← catalogue

Jeremy

by Hugh Walpole · English · Gutenberg #3474 · 482,229 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Jeremy
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Jeremy

Author: Hugh Walpole


        
Release date: October 1, 2002 [eBook #3474]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3474

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks, the Online Distributed Proofreading Team,
        and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JEREMY ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team





JEREMY

By Hugh Walpole




          TO
          BRUCE
          FROM
          HIS LOVING UNCLE




CONTENTS

     CHAPTER

        I  THE BIRTHDAY

       II  THE FAMILY DOG

      III  CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME

       IV  MISS JONES

        V  THE SEA-CAPTAIN

       VI  FAMILY PRIDE

      VII  RELIGION

     VIII  TO COW FARM

       IX  THE AWAKENING OF CHARLOTTE

        X  MARY

       XI  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

      XII  HAMLET WAITS




          “It is due to him to say that he was
          an obedient boy and a boy whose word
          could be depended on...”

          Jackanapes




CHAPTER I. THE BIRTHDAY


I


About thirty years ago there was at the top of the right-hand side of
Orange Street, in Polchester, a large stone house. I say “was”; the
shell of it is still there, and the people who now live in it are quite
unaware, I suppose, that anything has happened to the inside of it,
except that they are certainly assured that their furniture is vastly
superior to the furniture of their predecessors. They have a gramophone,
a pianola, and a lift to bring the plates from the kitchen into the
dining-room, and a small motor garage at the back where the old pump
used to be, and a very modern rock garden where once was the pond with
the fountain that never worked. Let them cherish their satisfaction.
No one grudges it to them. The Coles were, by modern standards,
old-fashioned people, and the Stone House was an old-fashioned house.

Young Jeremy Cole was born there in the year 1884, very early in the
morning of December 8th. He was still there very early in the morning of
December 8th, 1892. He was sitting up in bed. The cuckoo clock had just
struck five, and he was aware that he was, at this very moment, for the
first time in his life, eight years old. He had gone to bed at eight
o'clock on the preceding evening with the choking consciousness that he
would awake in the morning a different creature. Although he had
slept, there had permeated the texture of his dreams that same choking
excitement, and now, wide awake, as though he had asked the cuckoo to
call him in order that he might not be late for the great occasion,
he stared into the black distance of his bedroom and reflected, with a
beating heart, upon the great event. He was eight years old, and he had
as much right now to the nursery arm-chair with a hole in it as Helen
had.

That was his first definite realisation of approaching triumph.
Throughout the whole of his seventh year he had fought with Helen, who
was most unjustly a year older than he and persistently proud of that
injustice, as to his right to use the wicker arm-chair whensoever it
pleased him. So destructive of the general peace of the house had
these incessant battles been, so unavailing the suggestions of elderly
relations that gentlemen always yielded to ladies, that a compromise had
been arrived at. When Jeremy was eight he should have equal rights with
Helen. Well and good. Jeremy had yielded to that. It was the only decent
chair in the nursery. Into the place where the wicker, yielding to
rude and impulsive pressure, had fallen away, one's body might be
most happily fitted. It was of exactly the right height; it made the
handsomest creaking noises when one rocked in it--and, in any case,
Helen was only a girl.

But the sense of his triumph had not yet fully descended upon him. As he
sat up in bed, yawning, with a tickle in the middle of his back and his
throat very dry; he was disappointingly aware that he was still the same
Jeremy of yesterday. He did not know what it was exactly that he had
expected, but he did not feel at present that confident proud glory for
which he had been prepared. Perhaps it was too early.

He turned round, curled his head into his arm, and with a half-muttered,
half-dreamt statement about the wicker chair, he was once again asleep.




II


He awoke to the customary sound of the bath water running into the bath.
His room was flooded with sunshine, and old Jampot, the nurse (her name
was Mrs. Preston and her shape was Jampot), was saying as usual:
“Now, Master Jeremy, eight o'clock; no lying in bed--out--you
get--bath--ready.”

He stared at her, blinking.

“You should say 'Many Happy Returns of the Day, Master Jeremy,'” he
remarked. Then suddenly, with a leap, he was out of bed, had crossed
the floor, pushed back the nursery door, and was sitting in the wicker
arm-chair, his naked feet kicking a triumphant dance.

“Helen! Helen!” he called. “I'm in the chair.”

No sound.

“I'm eight,” he shouted, “and I'm in the chair.”

Mrs. Preston, breathless and exclaiming, hurried across to him.

“Oh, you naughty boy... death of cold... in your nightshirt.”

“I'm eight,” he said, looking at her scornfully, “and I can sit here as
long as I please.”

Helen, her pigtails flapping on either shoulder, her nose red, as it
always was early in the morning, appeared at the opposite end of the
nursery.

“Nurse, he mustn't, must he? Tell him not to. I don't care how old you
are. It's my chair. Mother said--”

“No, she didn't. Mother said--”

“Yes, she did. Mother said--”

“Mother said that when--”

“Oh, you story. You know that Mother said--” Then suddenly a new,
stiffening, trusting dignity filled him, as though he had with a turn of
the head discovered himself in golden armour.

He was above this vulgar wrangling now. That was for girls. He was
superior to them all. He got down from the chair and stood, his head
up, on the old Turkey rug (red with yellow cockatoos) in front of the
roaring fire.

“You may have your old chair,” he said to Helen. “I'm eight now, and I
don't want it any more... although if I do want it I shall have it,” he
added.

He was a small, square boy with a pug-nosed face. His hair was light
brown, thin and stiff, so that it was difficult to brush, and although
you watered it, stood up in unexpected places and stared at you. His
eyes were good, dark brown and large, but he was in no way handsome; his
neck, his nose ridiculous. His mouth was too large, and his chin stuck
out like a hammer.

He was, plainly, obstinate and possibly sulky, although when he smiled
his whole face was lighted with humour. Helen was the only beautiful
Cole child, and she was abundantly aware of that fact. The Coles had
never been a good-looking family.

He stood in front of the fireplace now as he had seen his father do, his
short legs apart, his head up, and his hands behind his back.

“Now, Master Jeremy,” the Jampot continued, “you may be eight years old,
but it isn't a reason for disobedience the very first minute, and, of
course, your bath is ready and you catching your death with naked feet,
which you've always been told to put your slippers on and not to keep
the bath waiting, when there's Miss Helen and Miss Mary, as you very
well know, and breakfast coming in five minutes, which there's sausages
this morning, because it's your birthday, and them all getting cold--”

“Sausages!”

He was across the floor in a moment, had thrown off his nightshirt and
was in his bath. Sausages! He was translated into a world of excitement
and splendour. They had sausages so seldom, not always even on
birthdays, and to-day, on a cold morning, with a crackling fire and
marmalade, perhaps--and then all the presents.

Oh, he was happy. As he rubbed his back with the towel a wonderful
glowing Christian charity spread from his head to his toes and tingled
through every inch of him. Helen should sit in the chair when she
pleased; Mary should be allowed to dress and undress the large woollen
dog, known as “Sulks,” his own especial and beloved property, so often
as she wished; Jampot should poke the twisted end of the towel in his
ears and brush his hair with the hard brushes, and he would not say a
word. Aunt Mary should kiss him (as, of course, she would want to do),
and he would not shiver; he would (bravest deed of all) allow Mary to
read “Alice in Wonderland” in her sing-sing voice so long as ever she
wanted... Sausages! Sausages!

In his shirt and his short blue trousers, his hair on end, tugging at
his braces, he stood in the doorway and shouted:

“Helen, there are sausages--because it's my birthday. Aren't you glad?”

And even when the only response to his joyous invitation was Helen's
voice crossly admonishing the Jampot: “Oh, you do pull so; you're
hurting!”--his charity was not checked.

Then when he stood clothed and of a cheerful mind once more in front of
the fire a shyness stole over him. He knew that the moment for Presents
was approaching; he knew that very shortly he would have to kiss and be
kissed by a multitude of persons, that he would have to say again and
again, “Oh, thank you, thank you so much!” that he would have his usual
consciousness of his inability to thank anybody at all in the way that
they expected to be thanked. Helen and Mary never worried about such
things. They delighted in kissing and hugging and multitudes of words.
If only he might have had his presents by himself and then stolen out
and said “Thank you” to the lot of them and have done with it.

He watched the breakfast-table with increasing satisfaction--the large
teapot with the red roses, the dark blue porridge plates, the glass jar
with the marmalade a rich yellow inside it, the huge loaf with the
soft pieces bursting out between the crusty pieces, the solid square of
butter, so beautiful a colour and marked with a large cow and a tree on
the top (he had seen once in the kitchen the wooden shape with which
the cook made this handsome thing). There were also his own silver mug,
given him at his christening by Canon Trenchard, his godfather, and his
silver spoon, given him on the same occasion by Uncle Samuel.

All these things glittered and glowed in the firelight, and a kettle was
singing on the hob and Martha the canary was singing in her cage in
the window. (No one really knew whether the canary were a lady or a
gentleman, but the name had been Martha after a beloved housemaid, now
married to the gardener, and the sex had followed the name.)

There were also all the other familiar nursery things. The hole in the
Turkey carpet near the bookcase, the rocking-horse, very shiny where you
sit and very Christmas-tree-like as to its tail; the doll's house, now
deserted, because Helen was too old and Mary too clever; the pictures
of “Church on Christmas Morning” (everyone with their mouths very wide
open, singing a Christmas hymn, with holly), “Dignity and Impudence,”
 after Landseer, “The Shepherds and the Angels,” and “The Charge of the
Light Brigade.” So packed was the nursery with history for Jeremy that
it would have taken quite a week to relate it all. There was the
spot where he had bitten the Jampot's fingers, for which deed he had
afterwards been slippered by his father; there the corner where they
stood for punishment (he knew exactly how many ships with sails, how
many ridges of waves, and how many setting suns there were on that
especial piece of corner wallpaper--three ships, twelve ridges, two and
a half suns); there was the place where he had broken the ink bottle
over his shoes and the carpet, there by the window, where Mary had read
to him once when he had toothache, and he had not known whether her
reading or the toothache agonised him the more; and so on, an endless
sequence of sensational history.

His reminiscences were cut short by the appearance of Gladys with the
porridge. Gladys, who was only the between-maid, but was nevertheless
stout, breathless from her climb and the sentiment of the occasion,
produced from a deep pocket a dirty envelope, which she laid upon the
table.

“Many 'appy returns, Master Jeremy.” Giggle... giggle... “Lord save
us if I 'aven't gone and forgotten they spunes,” and she vanished. The
present-giving had begun.

He had an instant's struggle as to whether it were better to wait
until all the presents had accumulated, or whether he would take them
separately as they arrived. The dirty envelope lured him. He advanced
towards it and seized it. He could not read very easily the sprawling
writing on the cover, but he guessed that it said “From Gladys to Master
Jeremy.” Within was a marvellous card, tied together with glistening
cord and shining with all the colours of the rainbow. It was apparently
a survival from last Christmas, as there was a church in snow and a peal
of bells; he was, nevertheless, very happy to have it.

After his introduction events moved swiftly. First Helen and Mary
appeared, their faces shining and solemn and mysterious--Helen
self-conscious and Mary staring through her spectacles like a profound
owl.

Because Jeremy had known Mary ever since he could remember, he was
unaware that there was anything very peculiar about her. But in truth
she was a strange looking child. Very thin, she had a large head,
with big outstanding ears, spectacles, and yellow hair pulled back
and “stringy.” Her large hands were always red, and her forehead was
freckled. She was as plain a child as you were ever likely to see, but
there was character in her mouth and eyes, and although she was only
seven years old, she could read quite difficult books (she was engaged
at this particular time upon “Ivanhoe”), and she was a genius at sums.

The passion of her life, as the family were all aware, was Jeremy,
but it was an unfortunate and uncomfortable passion. She bothered and
worried him, she was insanely jealous; she would sulk for days did he
ever seem to prefer Helen to herself. No one understood her; she was
considered a “difficult child,” quite unlike any other member of the
family, except possibly Samuel, Mr. Cole's brother-in-law, who was an
unsuccessful painter and therefore “odd.”

As Mary was at present only seven years of age it would be too much to
say that the family was afraid of her. Aunt Amy's attitude was: “Well,
after all, she's sure to be clever when she grows up, poor child;” and
although the parishioners of Mary's father always alluded to her as “the
ludicrous Cole child,” they told awed little stories about the infant's
mental capacities, and concluded comfortably, “I'm glad Alice (or Jane
or Matilda or Anabel) isn't clever like that. They overwork when they
are young, and then when they grow up--”

Meanwhile Mary led her private life. She attached herself to no one
but Jeremy; she was delicate and suffered from perpetual colds; she
therefore spent much of her time in the nursery reading, her huge
spectacles close to the page, her thin legs like black sticks stuck
up on the fender in front of the fire or curled up under her on the
window-seat.

Very different was Helen. Helen had a mass of dark black hair, big black
eyes with thick eye-lashes, a thin white neck, little feet, and already
an eye to “effects” in dress. She was charming to strangers, to the
queer curates who haunted the family hall, to poor people and rich
people, to old people and young people. She was warm-hearted but not
impulsive, intelligent but not clever, sympathetic but not sentimental,
impatient but never uncontrolled. She liked almost everyone and almost
everything, but no one and nothing mattered to her very deeply; she
liked going to church, always learnt her Collect first on Sunday, and
gave half her pocket-money to the morning collection. She was generous
but never extravagant, enjoyed food but was not greedy. She was quite
aware that she was pretty and might one day be beautiful, and she was
glad of that, but she was never silly about her looks.

When Aunt Amy, who was always silly about everything, said in her
presence to visitors, “Isn't Helen the loveliest thing you ever saw?”
 she managed by her shy self-confidence to suggest that she was pretty,
that Aunt Amy was a fool, and life was altogether very agreeable, but
that none of these things was of any great importance. She was very good
friends with Jeremy, but she played no part in his life at all. At
the same time she often fought with him, simply from her real deep
consciousness of her superiority to him. She valued her authority
and asserted it incessantly. That authority had until last year been
unchallenged, but Jeremy now was growing. She had, although she did not
as yet realise it, a difficult time before her.

Helen and Mary advanced with their presents, laid them on the
breakfast-table, and then retreated to watch the effect of it all.

“Shall I now?” asked Jeremy.

“Yes, now,” said Helen and Mary.

There were three parcels, one large and “shoppy,” two small and bound
with family paper, tied by family hands with family string. He grasped
immediately the situation. The shoppy parcel was bought with mother's
money and only “pretended” to be from his sisters; the two small parcels
were the very handiwork of the ladies themselves, the same having been
seen by all eyes at work for the last six months, sometimes, indeed,
under the cloak of attempted secrecy, but more often--because weariness
or ill-temper made them careless--in the full light of day.

His interest was centred almost entirely in the “shoppy” parcel, which
by its shape might be “soldiers”; but he knew the rules of the game,
and disregarding the large, ostentatious brown-papered thing, he went
magnificently for the two small incoherent bundles.

He opened them. A flat green table-centre with a red pattern of roses, a
thick table-napkin ring worked in yellow worsted, these were revealed.

“Oh!” he cried, “just what I wanted.” (Father always said that on his
birthday.)

“Is it?” said Mary and Helen.

“Mine's the ring,” said Mary. “It's dirty rather, but it would have
got dirty, anyway, afterwards.” She watched anxiously to see whether he
preferred Helen's.

He watched them nervously, lest he should be expected to kiss them. He
wiped his mouth with his hand instead, and began rapidly to talk:

“Jampot will know now which mine is. She's always giving me the wrong
one. I'll have it always, and the green thing too.”

“It's for the middle of a table,” Helen interrupted.

“Yes, I know,” said Jeremy hurriedly. “I'll always have it too--like
Mary's--when I'm grown up and all.... I say, shall I open the other one
now?”

“Yes, you can,” said Helen and Mary, ceasing to take the central place
in the ceremony, spectators now and eagerly excited.

But Mary had a last word.

“You do like mine, don't you?”

“Of course, like anything.”

She wanted to say “Better than Helen's?” but restrained herself.

“I was ever so long doing it; I thought I wouldn't finish it in time.”

He saw with terror that she meditated a descent upon him; a kiss was in
the air. She moved forward; then, to his extreme relief, the door opened
and the elders arriving saved him.

There were Father and Mother, Uncle Samuel and Aunt Amy, all with
presents, faces of birthday tolerance and “do-as-you-please-to-day,
dear” expressions.

The Rev. Herbert Cole was forty years of age, rector of St. James's,
Polchester, during the last ten years, and marked out for greater
preferment in the near future. To be a rector at thirty is unusual,
but he had great religious gifts, preached an admirable “as-man-to-man”
 sermon, and did not believe in thinking about more than he could see. He
was an excellent father in the abstract sense, but the parish absorbed
too much of his time to allow of intimacies with anyone.

Mrs. Cole was the most placid lady in Europe. She had a comfortable
figure, but was not stout, here a dimple and there a dimple. Nothing
could disturb her. Children, servants, her husband's sermons, district
visiting, her Tuesday “at homes,” the butcher, the dean's wife, the
wives of the canons, the Polchester climate, bills, clothes, other
women's clothes--over all these rocks of peril in the sea of daily life
her barque happily floated. Some ill-natured people thought her stupid,
but in her younger days she had liked Trollope's novels in the Cornhill,
disapproved placidly of “Jane Eyre,” and admired Tennyson, so that she
could not be considered unliterary.

She was economical, warm-hearted, loved her children, talked only the
gentlest scandal, and was a completely happy woman--all this in the
placidest way in the world. Miss Amy Trefusis, her sister, was very
different, being thin both in her figure and her emotions. She skirted
tempestuously over the surface of things, was the most sentimental of
human beings, was often in tears over reminiscences of books or the
weather, was deeply religious in a superficial way, and really--although
she would have been entirely astonished had you told her so--cared for
no one in the world but herself. She was dressed always in dark colours,
with the high shoulders of the day, elegant bonnets and little chains
that jingled as she moved. In her soul she feared and distrusted
children, but she did not know this. She did know, however, that she
feared and distrusted her brother Samuel.

Her brother Samuel was all that the Trefusis family, as a conservative
body who believed in tradition, had least reason for understanding. He
had been a failure from the first moment of his entry into the Grammar
School in Polchester thirty-five years before this story. He had
continued a failure at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford. He had
desired to be a painter; he had broken from the family and gone to
study Art in Paris. He had starved and starved, was at death's door,
was dragged home, and there suddenly had relapsed into Polchester, lived
first on his father, then on his brother-in-law, painted about the town,
painted, made cynical remarks about the Polcastrians, painted, made
blasphemous remarks about the bishop, the dean and all the canons,
painted, and refused to leave his brother-in-law's house. He was a
scandal, of course; he was fat, untidy, wore a blue tam-o'-shanter when
he was “out,” and sometimes went down Orange Street in carpet slippers.

He was a scandal, but what are you to do if a relative is obstinate and
refuses to go? At least make him shave, say the wives of the canons. But
no one had ever made Samuel Trefusis do anything that he did not want to
do. He was sometimes not shaved for three whole days and nights. At any
rate, there he is. It is of no use saying that he does not exist, as
many of the Close ladies try to do. And at least he does not paint
strange women; he prefers flowers and cows and the Polchester woods,
although anything less like cows, flowers and woods, Mrs. Sampson, wife
of the Dean, who once had a water-colour in the Academy, says she has
never seen. Samuel Trefusis is a failure, and, what is truly awful, he
does not mind; nobody buys his pictures and he does not care; and, worst
taste of all, he laughs at his relations, although he lives on them.
Nothing further need be said.

To Helen, Mary and Jeremy he had always been a fascinating object,
although they realised, with that sharp worldly wisdom to be found in
all infants of tender years, that he was a failure, a dirty man, and
disliked children. He very rarely spoke to them; was once quite wildly
enraged when Mary was discovered licking his paints. (It was the paints
he seemed anxious about, not in the least the poor little thing's
health, as his sister Amy said), and had publicly been heard to say that
his brother-in-law had only got the children he deserved.

Nevertheless Jeremy had always been interested in him. He liked his fat
round shape, his rough, untidy grey hair, his scarlet slippers, his blue
tam-o'-shanter, the smudges of paint sometimes to be discovered on his
cheeks, and the jingling noises he made in his pocket with his money. He
was certainly more fun than Aunt Amy.

There, then, they all were with their presents and their birthday faces.

“Shall I undo them for you, darling?” of course said Aunt Amy. Jeremy
shook his head (he did not say what he thought of her) and continued to
tug at the string. He was given a large pair of scissors. He received
(from Father) a silver watch, (from Mother) a paint-box, a dark blue and
gold prayer book with a thick squashy leather cover (from Aunt Amy).

He was in an ecstasy. How he had longed for a watch, just such a
turnip-shaped one, and a paint-box. What colours he could make! Even
Aunt Amy's prayer book was something, with its squashy cover and silk
marker (only why did Aunt Amy never give him anything sensible?). He
stood there, his face flushed, his eyes sparkling, the watch in one hand
and the paint-box in the other. Remarks were heard like: “You mustn't
poke it with, your finger, Jerry darling, or you'll break the hands
off”; and “I thought he'd, better have the square sort, and not the
tubes. They're so squashy”; and “You'll be able to learn your Collect so
easily with that big print, Jerry dear. Very kind of you, Amy.”

Meanwhile he was aware that Uncle Samuel had given him nothing. There
was a little thick catch of disappointment in his throat, not because
he wanted a present, but because he liked Uncle Samuel. Suddenly, from
somewhere behind him his uncle said: “Shut your eyes, Jerry. Don't open
them until I tell you”--then rather crossly, “No, Amy, leave me alone. I
know what I'm about, thank you.”

Jeremy shut his eyes tight. He closed them so that the eyelids seemed to
turn right inwards and red lights flashed. He stood there for at least
a century, all in darkness, no one saying anything save that once Mary
cried “Oh!” and clapped her hands, which same cry excited him to such
a pitch that he would have dug his nails into his hands had he not so
consistently in the past bitten them that there were no nails with which
to dig. He waited. He waited. He waited. He was not eight, he was eighty
when at last Uncle Samuel said, “Now you may look.”

He opened his eyes and turned; for a moment the nursery, too, rocked in
the unfamiliar light. Then he saw. On the middle of the nursery carpet
was a village, a real village, six houses with red roofs, green windows
and white porches, a church with a tower and a tiny bell, an orchard
with flowers on the fruit trees, a green lawn, a street with a butcher's
shop, a post office, and a grocer's. Villager Noah, Mrs. Noah and the
little Noahs, a field with cows, horses, dogs, a farm with chickens and
even two pigs...

He stood, he stared, he drew a deep breath.

“It comes all the way from Germany,” said Aunt Amy, who always made
things uninteresting if she possibly could.

There was much delighted talk. Jeremy said nothing. But Uncle Samuel
understood.

“Glad you like it,” he said, and left the room.

“Aren't you pleased?” said Helen.

Jeremy still said nothing.

“Sausages. Sausages!” cried Mary, as Gladys, grinning, entered with a
dish of a lovely and pleasant smell. But Jeremy did not turn. He simply
stood there--staring.




III


It is of the essence of birthdays that they cannot maintain throughout
a long day the glorious character of their early dawning. In Polchester
thirty years ago there were no cinematographs, no theatre save for
an occasional amateur performance at the Assembly Rooms and, once and
again, a magic-lantern show. On this particular day, moreover, Mr. and
Mrs. Cole were immensely busied with preparations for some parochial
tea. Miss Trefusis had calls to make, and, of course, Uncle Samuel was
invisible. The Birthday then suddenly became no longer a birthday but
an ordinary day--with an extraordinary standard. This is why so many
birthdays end in tears.

But Jeremy, as was usual with him, took everything quietly. He might cry
aloud about such an affair as the conquest of the wicker chair because
that did not deeply matter to him, but about the real things he was
silent. The village was one of the real things; during all the morning
he remained shut up in his soul with it, the wide world closed off from
them by many muffled doors. How had Uncle Samuel known that he had deep
in his own inside, so deep that he had not mentioned it even to himself,
wanted something just like this? Thirty years ago there were none of the
presents that there are for children now--no wonderful railways that
run round the nursery from Monte Carlo to Paris with all the stations
marked; no dolls that are so like fashionable women that you are given a
manicure set with them to keep their nails tidy; no miniature motor-cars
that run of themselves and go for miles round the floor without being
wound up. Jeremy knew none of these things, and was the happier that he
did not. To such a boy such a village was a miracle.... It had not come
from Germany, as Aunt Amy said, but from heaven. But it was even more
of Uncle Samuel than the village that he was thinking. When they
started--Helen, Mary and he in charge of the Jampot--upon their
afternoon walk, he was still asking himself the same questions. How had
Uncle Samuel known so exactly? Had it been a great trouble to bring from
so far away? Had Uncle Samuel thought it bad of him not to thank him?

He was lost in such considerations when the Jampot inquired of him the
way that their walk should take--it was his choice because it was his
Birthday. He had no choice. There was one walk that far exceeded all
others in glory, straight down Orange Street, straight again through the
Market, past the Assembly Rooms and the Town Hall, past the flower and
fruit stalls, and the old banana woman under the green umbrella and
the toy stall with coloured balloons, the china dogs and the nodding
donkeys, up the High Street, into the cobble-stones of the Close, whence
one could look down, between the houses on to the orchards, round the
Cathedral with the meadows, Pol Meads sloping down to the river, so
through Orchard Lane into Orange Street once again.

Such a walk combined every magic and delight known to the heart of man,
but it was not generally allowed, because Jeremy would drag past the
shops, the stalls in the Market Place and the walk behind the Cathedral,
whence one might sometimes see boats on the river, sheep and cows in the
meads, and, in their proper season, delight of delights--lambs.

They set out...

Thirty years ago the winter weather in Polchester was wonderful. Now,
of course, there are no hard winters, no frost, no snow, no waits, no
snowmen, and no skating on the Pol. Then there were all those things.
To-day was of a hard, glittering frost; the sun, like a round, red
lacquer tray, fell heavily, slowly through a faint pale sky that was
not strong enough to sustain it. The air had the cold, sweet twang of
peppermints in the throat. Polchester was a painted town upon a blue
screen, the Cathedral towers purple against the sky; the air was scented
with burning leaves, and cries from the town rose up clear and hard,
lingering and falling like notes of music. Somewhere they were playing
football, and the shouting was distant and regular like the tramp of
armed men. “Three” struck the Cathedral clock, as though it were calling
“Open Sesame.” Other lesser clocks repeated the challenge cry through
the town. “Woppley--Woppley--Why!” sung the man who was selling skins
down Orange Street. The sky, turning slowly from blue to gold, shone
mysteriously through the glass of the street lamps, and the sun began to
wrap itself in tints of purple and crocus and iris.

“Woppley--Woppley--Why!” screamed the skin-man suddenly appearing at the
top of the street.

“Now 'urry, Master Jeremy,” said the Jampot, “or we shall never get
'ome this night, and I might have known you'd choose the longest walk
possible. Come along, Miss Mary, now--none of that dawdling.”

Jeremy, in his H.M.S. Adventure's cap and rough blue navy coat, felt
himself superior to the Jampot, so he only said, “Oh, don't bother,
Nurse,” and then in the same breath, “I'll run you down the hill, Mary,”
 and before anyone could say a word there they were at the bottom of
Orange Street, as though they had fallen into a well. The sun was gone,
the golden horizon was gone--only the purple lights began to gather
about their feet and climb slowly the high black houses.

Mary liked this, because she now had Jeremy to herself. She began
hurriedly, so that she should lose no time:

“Shall I tell you a story, Jeremy? I've got a new one. Once upon a time
there were three little boys, and they lived in a wood, and an old witch
ate them, and the Princess who had heaps of jewellery and a white horse
and a lovely gold dress came, and it was snowing and the witch--”

This was always Mary's way. She loved to tell Jeremy interesting
stories, and he did not mind because he did not listen and could
meanwhile think his own thoughts.

His chief decision arrived at as he marched along was that he would keep
the village to himself; no one else should put their fingers into it,
arrange the orchard with the coloured trees, decide upon the names of
the Noah family, settle the village street in its final order, ring
the bell of the church, or milk the cows. He alone would do all these
things. And, so considering, he seemed to himself very like God. God,
he supposed, could pull Polchester about, root out a house here, another
there, knock the Assembly Rooms down and send a thunderbolt on to the
apple woman's umbrella. Well, then--so could he with his village. He
walked swollen with pride. He arrived at the first Island of Circe,
namely, the window of Mr. Thompson, the jeweller in Market Street,
pressed his nose to the pane, and refused to listen when the Jampot
suggested that he should move forward.

He could see the diamonds like drops of water in the sun, and the pearls
like drops of milk, and the rubies like drops of blood, but it was not
of diamonds, pearls or rubies that he was thinking--he thought only of
his village. He would ring the church bell, and then all the Noah family
should start out of the door, down the garden, up the village street...
It did not matter if one of the younger Noahs should be lazy and wish to
stay at home beneath the flowering trees of the orchard. She would not
be allowed... He was as God.. . He was as God... The butcher should
go (if he was not stuck to his shop), and even some of his cows might
go.... He was as God...

He heard Mary's voice in his ear.

“And after that they all ate chocolates with white cream and red cream,
and they sucked it off pins, and there were hard bits and soft bits, and
the Princess (she was a frog now. You remember, don't you, Jeremy? The
witch turned her) hotted the oven like cook has, with black doors, and
hotted it and hotted it, but suddenly there was a noise--”

And, on the other side, the Jampot's voice: “You naughty boy, stoppin'
'ere for everyone to see, just because it's your birthday, which I wish
there wasn't no birthdays, nor there wouldn't be if I had my way.”

Jeremy turned from Mr. Thompson's window, a scornful smile on his face:

“I'm bigger'n you, Nurse,” he said. “If I said out loud, 'I won't go,' I
wouldn't go, and no one could make me.”

“Well, come along, then,” said Nurse.

“Don't be so stupid, Jerry,” said Helen calmly. “If a policeman came and
said you had to go home you'd have to go.”

“No I wouldn't,” said Jeremy.

“Then they'd put you in prison.”

“They could.”

“They'd hang you, perhaps.”

“They could,” replied Jeremy.

Farther than this argument cannot go, so Helen shrugged her shoulders
and said: “You are silly.”

And they all moved forward.

He found then that this new sense or God-like power detracted a little
from the excitements of the Market Place, although the flower-stall was
dazzling with flowers; there was a new kind of pig that lifted its tail
and lowered it again on the toy stall, and the apple-woman was as fat as
ever and had thick clumps of yellow bananas hanging most richly around
her head. They ascended the High Street and reached the Close. It was
half-past three, and the Cathedral bells had begun to ring for evensong.
All the houses in the Close were painted with a pale yellow light;
across the long green Cathedral lawn thin black shadows like the fingers
of giants pointed to the Cathedral door. All was so silent here that the
bells danced against the houses and back again, the echoes lingering in
the high elms and mingling with the placid cooing of the rooks.

“There's Mrs. Sampson,” said Jeremy. “Aunt Amy says she's a wicked
woman. Do you think she's a wicked woman, Nurse?” He gazed at the stout
figure with interest. If he were truly God he would turn her into a
rabbit. This thought amused him, and he began to laugh.

“You naughty boy; now come along, do,” said the Jampot, who distrusted
laughter in Jerry.

“I'll ring the bells when I grow up,” he said, “and I'll ring them in
the middle of the night, so that everyone will have to go to church when
they don't want to. I'll be able to do what I like when I grow up.”

“No, you won't,” said Helen. “Father and Mother can't do what they
like.”

“Yes they can,” said Jeremy.

“No they can't,” answered Helen, “or they would.”

“So they do,” said Jeremy--“silly.”

“Silly yourself,” said Helen very calmly, because she knew very well
that she was not silly.

“Now, children, stop it, do,” said the Jampot.

Jeremy's sense of newly received power reached its climax when they
walked round the Close and reached the back of the Cathedral. I know
that now, both for Jeremy and me, that prospect has dwindled into
its proper grown-up proportions, but how can a man, be he come to
threescore and ten and more, ever forget the size, the splendour, the
stupendous extravagance of that early vision?

Jeremy saw that day the old fragment of castle wall, the green expanse
falling like a sheeted waterfall from the Cathedral heights, the blue
line of river flashing in the evening sun between the bare-boughed
trees, the long spaces of black shadow spreading slowly over the colour,
as though it were all being rolled up and laid away for another day;
the brown frosty path of the Rope Walk, the farther bank climbing into
fields and hedges, ending in the ridge of wood, black against the golden
sky. And all so still! As the children stood there they could catch
nestlings' faint cries, stirrings of dead leaves and twigs, as birds
and beasts moved to their homes; the cooing of the rooks about the black
branches seemed to promise that this world should be for ever tranquil,
for ever cloistered and removed; the sun, red and flaming above the dark
wood, flung white mists hither and thither to veil its departure. The
silence deepened, the last light flamed on the river and died upon the
hill.

“Now, children, come along do,” said the Jampot who had been held
in spite of herself, and would pay for it, she knew, in rheumatism
to-morrow. It was then that Jeremy's God-flung sense of power, born
from that moment early in the day when he had sat in the wicker chair,
reached its climax. He stood there, his legs apart, looking upon the
darkening world and felt that he could do anything--anything...

At any rate, there was one thing that he could do, disobey the Jampot.

“I'm not coming,” he said, “till I choose.”

“You wicked boy!” she cried, her temper rising with the evening chills,
her desire for a cup of hot tea, and an aching longing for a comfortable
chair. “When everyone's been so good to you to-day and the things you've
been given and all--why, it's a wicked shame.”

The Jampot, who was a woman happily without imagination, saw a naughty
small boy spoiled and needing the slipper.

A rook, taking a last look at the world before retiring to rest,
watching from his leafless bough, saw a mortal spirit defying the
universe, and sympathised with it.

“I shall tell your mother,” said the Jampot. “Now come, Master Jeremy,
be a good boy.”

“Oh, don't bother, Nurse,” he answered impatiently. “You're such a
fuss.”

She realised in that moment that he was suddenly beyond her power, that
he would never be within it again. She had nursed him for eight years,
she had loved him in her own way; she, dull perhaps in the ways of
the world, but wise in the ways of nurses, ways that are built up of
surrender and surrender, gave him, then and there, to the larger life...

“You may behave as you like, Master Jeremy,” she said. “It won't be for
long that I'll have the dealing with you, praise be. You'll be going to
school next September, and then we'll see what'll happen to your wicked
pride.”

“School!” he turned upon her, his eyes wide and staring.

“School!” he stared at them all.

The world tumbled from him. In his soul was a confusion of triumph and
dismay, of excitement and loneliness, of the sudden falling from him of
all old standards, old horizons, of pride and humility... How little
now was the Village to him. He looked at them to see whether they could
understand. They could not.

Very quietly he followed them home. His birthday had achieved its
climax...




CHAPTER II. THE FAMILY DOG


I


That winter of Jeremy's eighth birthday was famous for its snow.
Glebeshire has never yielded to the wishes of its children in the matter
of snowy Christmases, and Polchester has the reputation of muggy warmth
and foggy mists, but here was a year when traditions were fulfilled
in the most reckless manner, and all the 1892 babies were treated to a
present of snow on so fine a scale that certainly for the rest of their
days they will go about saying: “Ah, you should see the winters we used
to have when we were children...”

The snow began on the very day after Jeremy's birthday, coming down
doubtfully, slowly, little grey flakes against a grey sky, then
sparkling white, then vanishing flashes of moisture on a wet,
unsympathetic soil. That day the snow did not lie; and for a week it did
not come again; then with a whirl it seized the land, and for two
days and nights did not loosen its grip. From the nursery windows the
children watched it, their noses making little rings on the window-pane,
their delighted eyes snatching fascinating glimpses of figures tossed
through the storm, cabs beating their way, the rabbit-skin man, the
milkman, the postman, brave adventurers all, fighting, as it seemed, for
their very lives.

For two days the children did not leave the house, and the natural
result of that was that on the second afternoon tempers were, like so
many dogs, straining, tugging, pulling at their chains.

It could not be denied that Jeremy had been tiresome to everyone since
the afternoon when he had heard the news of his going to school next
September. It had seemed to him a tremendous event, the Beginning of the
End. To the others, who lived in the immediate present, it was a crisis
so remote as scarcely to count at all. Mary would have liked to be
sentimental about it, but from this she was sternly prevented. There was
then nothing more to be said...

Jeremy was suddenly isolated from them all. His destiny was peculiar.
They were girls, he was a boy. They understood neither his fears nor his
ambitions; he needed terribly a companion. The snow, shutting them in,
laughed at their struggles against monotony. The nursery clock struck
three and they realised that two whole hours must pass before the next
meal. Mary, her nose red from pressing on the window-pane, her eyes
gazing through her huge spectacles wistfully at Jeremy, longed to
suggest that she should read aloud to him. She knew that he hated it;
she pretended to herself that she did not know.

Jeremy stared desperately at Helen who was sitting, dignified and
collected, in the wicker chair hemming a minute handkerchief.

“We might play Pirates,” Jeremy said with a little cough, the better to
secure her attention. There was no answer.

“Or there's the hut in the wood--if anyone likes it better,” he added
politely. He did not know what was the matter. Had the Jampot not told
him about school he would at this very moment be playing most happily
with his village. It spread out there before him on the nursery floor,
the Noah family engaged upon tea in the orchard, the butcher staring
with fixed gaze from the door of his shop, three cows and a sheep
absorbed in the architecture of the church.

He sighed, then said again: “Perhaps Pirates would be better.”

Still Helen did not reply. He abandoned the attempted control of his
passions.

“It's very rude,” he said, “not to answer when gentlemen speak to you.”

“I don't see any gentlemen,” answered Helen quietly, without raising her
eyes, which was, as she knew, a provoking habit.

“Yes, you do,” almost screamed Jeremy. “I'm one.”

“You're not,” continued Helen; “you're only eight. Gentlemen must be
over twenty like Father or Mr. Jellybrand.”

“I hate Mr. Jellybrand and I hate you,” replied Jeremy.

“I don't care,” said Helen.

“Yes, you do,” said Jeremy, then suddenly, as though even a good quarrel
were not worth while on this heavily burdened afternoon, he said gently:
“You might play Pirates, Helen. You can be Sir Roger.”

“I've got this to finish.”

“It's a dirty old thing,” continued Jeremy, pursuing an argument, “and
it'll be dirtier soon, and the Jampot says you do all the stitches
wrong. I wish I was at school.”

“I wish you were,” said Helen.

There was a pause after this. Jeremy went sadly back to his window-seat.
Mary felt that her moment had arrived. Sniffing, as was her habit when
she wanted something very badly, she said in a voice that was little
more than a whisper:

“It would be fun, wouldn't it, perhaps if I read something, Jeremy?”

Jeremy was a gentleman, although he was only eight. He looked at her and
saw behind the spectacles eyes beseeching his permission.

“Well, it wouldn't be much fun,” he said, “but it's all beastly this
afternoon, anyway.”

“Can I sit on the window too?” asked Mary.

“Not too close, because it tickles my ear, but you can if you like.”

She hurried across to the bookshelf. “There's 'Stumps' and 'Rags and
Tatters,' and 'Engel the Fearless,' and 'Herr Baby' and 'Alice' and--”

“'Alice' is best,” said Jeremy, sighing. “You know it better than the
others.” He curled himself into a corner of the window-seat. From his
position there he had a fine view. Immediately below him was the garden,
white and grey under the grey sky, the broken fountain standing up like
a snow man in the middle of it. The snow had ceased to fall and a great
stillness held the world.

Beyond the little iron gate of the garden that always sneezed “Tishoo”
 when you closed it, was the top of Orange Street; then down the hill
on the right was the tower of his father's church; exactly opposite the
gate was the road that led to the Orchards, and on the right of that was
the Polchester High School for Young Ladies, held in great contempt by
Jeremy, the more that Helen would shortly be a day-boarder there, would
scream with the other girls, and, worst of all, would soon be seen
walking with her arm round another girl's neck, chattering and eating
sweets...

The whole world seemed deserted. No colour, no movement, no sound. He
sighed once more--“I'd like to eat jam and jam--lots of it,” he thought.
“It would be fun to be sick.”

Mary arrived and swung herself up on to the window-seat.

“It's the 'Looking Glass' one. I hope you don't mind,” she said
apprehensively.

“Oh, it's all right,” he allowed. He flung a glance back to the lighted
nursery. It seemed by contrast with that grey world outside to blaze
with colour; the red-painted ships on the wallpaper, the bright lights
and shadows of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the salmon fronts of
the doll's house, the green and red of the village on the floor with the
flowery trees, the blue tablecloth, the shining brass coal-scuttle all
alive and sparkling in the flames and shadows of the fire, caught and
held by the fine gold of the higher fender. Beyond that dead white--soon
it would be dark, the curtains would be drawn, and still there would be
nothing to do. He sighed again.

“It's a nice bit about the shop,” said Mary. Jeremy said nothing, so she
began. She started at a run:

“She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have '“--sniff, sniff--“,'
sud-den-ly suddenly wra-wra-w-r-a-p-p-e-d wrapped--'”

“Wrapped?” asked Jeremy.

“I don't know,” said Mary, rubbing her nose, “what it means, but perhaps
we'll see presently, herself up in w-o-o-l wool. 'Alice rubbed her eyes
and looked again she couldn't--'”

“'Looked again she couldn't'?” asked Jeremy. “It should be, 'she
couldn't look again.'”

“Oh, there's a stop,” said Mary. “I didn't see. After 'again' there's a
stop. 'She couldn't make out what had happened at all--'”

“I can't either,” said Jeremy crossly. “It would be better perhaps if I
read it myself.”

“It will be all right in a minute,” said Mary confidently. “'Was she in
a shop? And was that really--was it really a ship that was sitting on
the counter?'” she finished with a run.

“A what?” asked Jeremy.

“A ship--”

“A ship! How could it sit on a counter?” he asked.

“Oh no, it's a sheep. How silly I am!” Mary exclaimed.

“You do read badly,” he agreed frankly. “I never can understand
nothing.” And it was at that very moment that he saw the Dog.




II


He had been staring down into the garden with a gaze half abstracted,
half speculative, listening with one ear to Mary, with the other to
the stir of the fire, the heavy beat of the clock and the rustlings of
Martha the canary.

He watched the snowy expanse of garden, the black gate, the road beyond.
A vast wave of pale grey light, the herald of approaching dusk, swept
the horizon, the snowy roofs, the streets, and Jeremy felt some contact
with the strange air, the mysterious omens that the first snows of the
winter spread about the land. He watched as though he were waiting for
something to happen.

The creature came up very slowly over the crest of Orange Street. No
one else was in sight, no cart, no horse, no weather-beaten wayfarer. At
first the dog was only a little black smudge against the snow; then,
as he arrived at the Coles' garden-gate, Jeremy could see him very
distinctly. He was, it appeared, quite alone; he had been, it was
evident, badly beaten by the storm. Intended by nature to be a rough
and hairy dog, he now appeared before God and men a shivering battered
creature, dripping and wind-tossed, bedraggled and bewildered. And
yet, even in that first distant glimpse, Jeremy discerned a fine
independence. He was a short stumpy dog, in no way designed for
dignified attitudes and patronising superiority; nevertheless, as he now
wandered slowly up the street, his nose was in the air and he said to
the whole world: “The storm may have done its best to defeat me--it has
failed. I am as I was. I ask charity of no man. I know what is due to
me.”

It was this that attracted Jeremy; he had himself felt thus after a
slippering from his father, or idiotic punishments from the Jampot, and
the uninvited consolations of Mary or Helen upon such occasions had been
resented with so fierce a bitterness that his reputation for sulkiness
had been soundly established with all his circle.

Mary was reading...! “'an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair, knitting,
and every now and then leaving off to look at her through a great pair
of spec-t-a-c-les spectacles!'”

He touched her arm and whispered:

“I say, Mary, stop a minute--look at that dog down there.”

They both stared down into the garden. The dog had stopped at the gate;
it sniffed at the bars, sniffed at the wall beyond, then very slowly but
with real dignity continued its way up the road.

“Poor thing,” said Jeremy. “It IS in a mess.” Then to their astonishment
the dog turned back and, sauntering down the road again as though it
had nothing all day to do but to wander about, and as though it were not
wet, shivering and hungry, it once more smelt the gate.

“Oh,” said Mary and Jeremy together.

“It's like Mother,” said Jeremy, “when she's going to see someone and
isn't sure whether it's the right house.”

Then, most marvellous of unexpected climaxes, the dog suddenly began to
squeeze itself between the bottom bar of the gate and the ground. The
interval was fortunately a large one; a moment later the animal was in
the Coles' garden.

The motives that led Jeremy to behave as he did are uncertain. It may
have been something to do with the general boredom of the afternoon,
it may have been that he felt pity for the bedraggled aspect of
the animal--most probable reason of all, was that devil-may-care
independence flung up from the road, as it were, expressly at himself.

The dog obviously did not feel any great respect for the Cole household.
He wandered about the garden, sniffing and smelling exactly as though
the whole place belonged to him, and a ridiculous stump of tail,
unsubdued by the weather, gave him the ludicrous dignity of a Malvolio.

“I'm going down,” whispered Jeremy, flinging a cautious glance at Helen
who was absorbed in her sewing.

Mary's eyes grew wide with horror and admiration. “You're not going
out,” she whispered. “In the snow. Oh, Jeremy. They WILL be angry.”

“I don't care,” whispered Jeremy back again. “They can be.”

Indeed, before Mary's frightened whisper he had not intended to do more
than creep down into the pantry and watch the dog at close range; now
it was as though Mary had challenged him. He knew that it was the most
wicked thing that he could do--to go out into the snow without a coat
and in his slippers. He might even, according to Aunt Amy, die of
it, but as death at present meant no more to him than a position of
importance and a quantity of red-currant jelly and chicken, THAT
prospect did not deter him. He left the room so quietly that Helen did
not even lift her eyes.

Then upon the landing he waited and listened. The house had all the
lighted trembling dusk of the snowy afternoon; there was no sound save
the ticking of the clocks. He might come upon the Jampot at any moment,
but this was just the hour when she liked to drink her cup of tea in the
kitchen; he knew from deep and constant study every movement of her
day. Fortune favoured him. He reached without trouble the little dark
corkscrew servants' staircase. Down this he crept, and found himself
beside the little gardener's door. Although here there was only snow-lit
dusk, he felt for the handle of the lock, found it, turned it, and was,
at once, over the steps, into the garden.

Here, with a vengeance, he felt the full romance and danger of his
enterprise. It was horribly cold; he had been in the nursery for two
whole days, wrapped up and warm, and now the snowy world seemed to
leap up at him and drag him down as though into an icy well. Mysterious
shadows hovered over the garden; the fountain pointed darkly against the
sky, and he could feel from the feathery touches upon his face that the
snow had begun to fall again.

He moved forward a few steps; the house was so dark behind him, the
world so dim and uncertain in front of him, that for a moment his heart
failed him. He might have to search the whole garden for the dog.

Then he heard a sniff, felt something wet against his leg--he had almost
stepped upon the animal. He bent down and stroked its wet coat. The dog
stood quite still, then moved forward towards the house, sniffed at the
steps, at last walked calmly through the open door as though the house
belonged to him. Jeremy followed, closed the door behind him; then there
they were in the little dark passage with the boy's heart beating like a
drum, his teeth chattering, and a terrible temptation to sneeze hovering
around him. Let him reach the nursery and establish the animal there and
all might be well, but let them be discovered, cold and shivering, in
the passage, and out the dog would be flung. He knew so exactly what
would happen. He could hear the voices in the kitchen. He knew that they
were sitting warm there by the fire, but that at any moment Jampot might
think good to climb the stairs and see “what mischief they children were
up to.” Everything depended upon the dog. Did he bark or whine, out into
the night he must go again, probably to die in the cold. But Jeremy,
the least sentimental of that most sentimental race the English, was too
intent upon his threatened sneeze to pay much attention to these awful
possibilities.

He took off his slippers and began to climb the stairs, the dog close
behind him, very grave and dignified, in spite of the little trail of
snow and water that he left in his track. The nursery door was reached,
pushed softly open, and the startled gaze of Mary and Helen fell
wide-eyed upon the adventurer and his prize.




III


The dog went directly to the fire; there, sitting in the very middle of
the golden cockatoos on the Turkey rug, he began to lick himself. He did
this by sitting very square on three legs and spreading out the fourth
stiff and erect, as though it had been not a leg at all but something of
wood or iron. The melted snow poured off him, making a fine little pool
about the golden cockatoos. He must have been a strange-looking animal
at any time, being built quite square like a toy dog, with a great
deal of hair, very short legs, and a thick stubborn neck; his eyes were
brown, and now could be seen very clearly because the hair that usually
covered them was plastered about his face by the snow. In his normal day
his eyes gleamed behind his hair like sunlight in a thick wood. He wore
a little pointed beard that could only be considered an affectation; in
one word, if you imagine a ridiculously small sheep-dog with no legs,
a French beard and a stump of a tail, you have him. And if you want
to know more than that I can only refer you to the description of his
great-great-great-grandson “Jacob,” described in the Chronicles of the
Beaminster Family.

The children meanwhile gazed, and for a long time no one said a word.
Then Helen said: “Father WILL be angry.”

But she did not mean it. The three were, by the entrance of the dog,
instantly united into an offensive and defensive alliance. They knew
well that shortly an attack from the Outside World must be delivered,
and without a word spoken or a look exchanged they were agreed to defend
both themselves and the dog with all the strength in their power. They
had always wanted a dog; they had been prevented by the stupid and
selfish arguments of uncomprehending elders.

Now this dog was here; they would keep him.

“Oh, he's perfectly sweet,” suddenly said Helen.

The dog paused for a moment from his ablutions, raised his eyes, and
regarded her with a look of cold contempt, then returned to his task.

“Don't be so silly,” said Jeremy. “You know you always hate it when Aunt
Amy says things like that about you.”

“Did Nurse see?” asked Mary.

“No, she didn't,” said Jeremy; “but she'll be up in a minute.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Mary her mouth wide open.

“Do? Keep him, of course,” said Jeremy stoutly; at the same time
his heart a little failed him as he saw the pool of the water slowly
spreading and embracing one cockatoo after another in its ruinous flood.

“We ought to wipe him with a towel,” said Jeremy; “if we could get him
dry before Nurse comes up she mightn't say so much.”

But alas, it was too late for any towel; the door opened, and the Jampot
entered, humming a hymn, very cheerful and rosy from the kitchen fire
and an abundant series of chronicles of human failings and misfortunes.
The hymn ceased abruptly. She stayed there where she was, “frozen into
an image,” as she afterwards described it. She also said: “You could
'ave knocked me down with a feather.”

The dog did not look at her, but crocked under him the leg that had been
stiff like a ramrod and spread out another. The children did not speak.

“Well!” For a moment words failed her; then she began, her hands spread
out as though she was addressing a Suffragette meeting in Trafalgar
Square. (She knew, happy woman, nothing of Suffragettes.) “Of all the
things, and it's you, Master Jeremy, that 'as done it, as anyone might
have guessed by the way you've been be'aving this last fortnight, and
what's come over you is more nor I nor anyone else can tell, which I was
saying only yesterday to your mother that it's more than one body
and pair of hands is up to the managing of now you've got so wild and
wicked; and wherever from did you get the dirty animal dropping water
all over the nursery carpet and smelling awful, I'll be bound, which
anyone can see that's got eyes, and you'd know what your father will
do to you when he knows of it, and so he shall, as sure as my name is
Lizzie Preston.... Go on out, you ugly, dirty animal-ough, you 'orrible
creature you. I'll--”

But her advance was stopped. Jeremy stopped it. Standing in front of the
dog, his short thick legs spread defiantly apart, his fists clenched, he
almost shouted:

“You shan't touch him.... No, you shan't. I don't care. He shan't go out
again and die. You're a cruel, wicked woman.”

The Jampot gasped. Never, no, never in all her long nursing experience
had she been so defied, so insulted.

Her teeth clicked as always when her temper was roused, the reason being
that thirty years ago the arts and accomplishments of dentistry had not
reached so fine a perfection as to-day can show.

She had, moreover, bought a cheap set. Her teeth clicked. She began:
“The moment your mother comes I give her notice. To think that all these
years I've slaved and slaved only to be told such things by a boy as--”

Then a very dramatic thing occurred. The door opened, just as it might
in the third act of a play by M. Sardou, and revealed the smiling faces
of Mrs. Cole, Miss Amy Trefusis and the Rev. William Jellybrand, Senior
Curate of St. James's, Orange Street.

Mr. Jellybrand had arrived, as he very often did, to tea. He had
expressed a desire, as he very often did, to see the “dear children.”
 Mrs. Cole, liking to show her children to visitors, even to such regular
and ordinary ones as Mr. Jellybrand, at once was eager to gratify his
desire.

“We'll catch them just before their tea,” she said happily.

There is an unfortunate tendency on the part of our Press and stage to
caricature our curates; this tendency I would willingly avoid. It should
be easy enough to do, as I am writing about Polchester, a town that
simply abounds--and also abounded thirty years ago--in curates of the
most splendid and manly type. But, unfortunately, Mr. Jellybrand was
not one of these. I, myself, remember him very well, and can see him now
flinging his thin, black, and--as it seemed to me then--gigantic figure
up Orange Street, his coat flapping behind him, his enormous boots
flapping in front of him, and his huge hands flapping on each side of
him like a huge gesticulating crow.

He had, the Polchester people who liked him said, “a rich voice.” The
others who did not like him called him “an affected ass.” He ran up and
down the scale like this:

    ______________________________________________________________
                                 Mrs.
    ______________________________________________________________
                        dear
    ______________________________________________________________
                  My
    ______________________________________________________________
                                        Cole.
    ______________________________________________________________


and his blue cheeks looked colder than any iceberg. But then I must
confess that I am prejudiced. I did not like him; no children did.

The Cole children hated him. Jeremy because he had damp hands, Helen
because he never looked at her, Mary because he once said to her,
“Little girls must play as well as work, you know.” He always talked
down to us as though we were beings of another and inferior planet. He
called it, “Getting on with the little ones.” No, he was not popular
with us.

He stood on this particular and dramatic occasion in front of the
group in the doorway and stared--as well he might. Unfortunately the
situation, already bad enough, was aggravated by this dark prominence of
Mr. Jellybrand. It cannot be found in any chronicles that Mr. Jellybrand
and the dog had met before; it is simply a fact that the dog,
raising his eyes at the opening of the door and catching sight of the
black-coated figure, forgot instantly his toilet, rose dripping from his
rug, and advanced growling, his lips back, his ears out, his tail erect,
towards the door. Then everything happened together. Mr. Jellybrand, who
had been afraid of dogs ever since, as an infant, he had been mistaken
for a bone by a large retriever, stepped back upon Aunt Amy, who uttered
a shrill cry. Mrs. Cole, although she did not forsake her accustomed
placidity, said: “Nurse... Nurse...” Jeremy cried: “It's all right, he
wouldn't touch anything, he's only friendly.” Mary and Helen together
moved forward as though to protect Jeremy, and the Jampot could be
heard in a confused wail: “Not me, Mum... Wickedest boy... better give
notice... as never listens... dog... dog...”

The animal, however, showed himself now, as at that first earlier view
of him, indifferent to his surroundings. He continued his advance and
then, being only a fraction of an inch from Mr. Jellybrand's tempting
gleaming black trousers, he stopped, crouched like a tiger, and with
teeth still bared continued his kettle-like reverberations. Aunt
Amy, who hated dogs, loved Mr. Jellybrand, and was not in the least
sentimental when her personal safety was in danger, cried in a shrill
voice: “But take it away. Take it away. Alice, tell him. It's going to
bite Mr. Jellybrand.”

The dog raised one eye from his dreamy contemplation of the trousers and
glanced at Aunt Amy; from that moment may be dated a feud which death
only concluded. This dog was not a forgetful dog.

Jeremy advanced. “It's all right,” he cried scornfully. “He wouldn't
bite anything.” He bent down, took the animal by the scruff of the neck,
and proceeded to lead it back to the fire. The animal went without a
moment's hesitation; it would be too much to say that it exchanged a
wink with Jeremy, but something certainly passed between them. Back
again on the Turkey rug he became master of the situation. He did the
only thing possible: he disregarded entirely the general company and
addressed himself to the only person of ultimate importance--namely,
Mrs. Cole. He lay down on all fours, looked up directly into her face,
bared his teeth this time in a smile and not in a growl, and wagged his
farcical tail.

Mrs. Cole's psychology was of the simplest: if you were nice to her she
would do anything for you, but in spite of all her placidity she was
sometimes hurt in her most sensitive places. These wounds she never
displayed, and no one ever knew of them, and indeed they passed
very quickly--but there they occasionally were. Now on what slender
circumstances do the fates of dogs and mortals hang. Only that afternoon
Mr. Jellybrand, in the innocent self-confidence of his heart, had agreed
with Miss Maple, an elderly and bitter spinster, that the next sewing
meeting of the Dorcas Sisterhood should be held in her house and not at
the Rectory. He had told Mrs. Cole of this on his way upstairs to the
nursery. Now Mrs. Cole liked the Dorcas meetings at the Rectory; she
liked the cheerful chatter, the hospitality, the gentle scandal and her
own position as hostess.

She did not like--she never liked--Miss Maple, who was always pushing
herself forward, criticising and back-biting. Mr. Jellybrand should not
have settled this without consulting her. He had taken it for granted
that she would agree. He had said: “I agreed with Miss Maple that it
would be better to have it at her house. I'm sure you will think as
I do.” Why should he be sure? Was he not forgetting his position a
little?...

Kindest woman in the world, she had seen with a strange un-Christian
pleasure the dog's advance upon the black trousers. Then Mr. Jellybrand
had been obviously afraid. He fancied, perhaps, that she too had been
afraid. He fancied, perhaps, that she was not mistress in her house,
that she could be browbeaten by her sister and her nurse.

She smiled at him. “There's no reason to be afraid, Mr. Jellybrand. ...
He's such a little dog.”

Then the dog smiled at her.

“Poor little thing,” she said. “He must have nearly died in the snow.”

Thus Miss Maple, bitterest of spinsters, influenced, all unwitting, the
lives not only of a dog and a curate, but of the entire Cole family, and
through them, of endless generations both of dogs and men as yet unborn.
Miss Maple, sitting in her little yellow-curtained parlour drinking,
in jaundiced contentment, her afternoon's cup of tea, was, of course,
unaware of this. A good thing that she was unaware--she was quite
conceited enough already.




IV


After that smiling judgment of Mrs. Cole's, affairs were quickly
settled.

“Of course it can only be for the night, children. Father will arrange
something in the morning. Poor little thing. Where did you find him?”

“We saw him from the window,” said Jeremy quickly, “and he was shivering
like anything, so we called him in to warm him.”

“My dear Alice, you surely don't mean--” began Aunt Amy, and the Jampot
said: “I really think, Mum-,” and Mr. Jellybrand, in his rich voice,
murmured: “Is it quite wise, dear Mrs. Cole, do you think?”

With thoughts of Miss Maple she smiled upon them all.

“Oh, for one night, I think we can manage. He seems a clean little dog,
and really we can't turn him out into the snow at once. It would be
too cruel. But mind, children, it's only for one night. He looks a good
little dog.”

When the “quality” had departed, Jeremy's mind was in a confused
condition of horror and delight. Such a victory as he had won over the
Jampot, a victory that was a further stage in the fight for independence
begun on his birthday, might have very awful qualities. There would
begin now one of the Jampot's sulks--moods well known to the Cole
family, and lasting from a day to a week, according to the gravity of
the offence. Yes, they had already begun. There she sat in her chair by
the fire, sewing, sewing, her fat, roly-poly face carved into a parody
of deep displeasure. Life would be very unpleasant now. No tops of eggs,
no marmalade on toast, no skins of milk, no stories of “when I was a
young girl,” no sitting up five minutes “later,” no stopping in the
market-place for a talk with the banana woman--only stern insistence on
every detail of daily life; swift judgment were anything left undone or
done wrong.

Jeremy sighed; yes, it would be horrid and, for the sake of the world in
general, which meant Mary and Helen, he must see what a little diplomacy
would do. Kneeling down by the dog, he looked up into her face with the
gaze of ingenuous innocence.

“You wouldn't have wanted the poor little dog to have died in the snow,
would you, Nurse?... It might, you know. It won't be any trouble, I
expect--”

There was no reply. He could hear Mary and Helen drawing in their
breaths with excited attention.

“Father always said we might have a dog one day when we were older--and
we are older now.”

Still no word.

“We'll be extra good, Nurse, if you don't mind. Don't you remember once
you said you had a dog when you were a little girl, and how you cried
when it had its ear bitten off by a nasty big dog, and how your mother
said she wouldn't have it fighting round the house, and sent it away,
and you cried, and cried, and cried, and how you said that p'r'aps we'll
have one one day?--and now we've got one.”

He ended triumphantly. She raised her eyes for one moment, stared at
them all, bit off a piece of thread, and said in deep, sepulchral tones:

“Either it goes, or I go.”

The three stared at one another. The Jampot go? Really go?... They could
hear their hearts thumping one after another. The Jampot go?

“Oh, Nurse, would you really?” whispered Mary. This innocent remark of
Mary's conveyed in the tone of it more pleased anticipation than was,
perhaps, polite. Certainly the Jampot felt this; a flood of colour
rose into her face. Her mouth opened. But what she would have said is
uncertain, for at that very moment the drama was further developed
by the slow movement of the door, and the revelation of half of Uncle
Samuel's body, clothed in its stained blue painting smock, and his ugly
fat face clothed in its usual sarcastic smile.

“Excuse me one moment,” he said; “I hear you have a dog.”

The Jampot rose, as good manners demanded, but said nothing.

“Where is the creature?” he asked.

The new addition to the Cole family had finished his washing; the
blazing fire had almost dried him, and his hair stuck out now from his
body in little stiff prickles, hedgehog fashion, giving him a truly
original appearance. His beard afforded him the air of an ambassador,
and his grave, melancholy eyes the absorbed introspection of a Spanish
hidalgo; his tail, however, in its upright, stumpy jocularity, betrayed
his dignity.

“There he is,” said Jeremy, with a glance half of terror, half of
delight, at the Jampot. “Isn't he lovely?”

“Lovely. My word!” Uncle Samuel's smile broadened. “He's about the most
hideous mongrel it's ever been my lot to set eyes on. But he has his
points. He despises you all, I'm glad to see.”

Jeremy, as usual with Uncle Samuel, was uncertain as to his sincerity.

“He looks a bit funny just now,” he explained. “He's been drying on the
rug. He'll be all right soon. He wanted to bite Mr. Jellybrand. It was
funny. Mr. Jellybrand was frightened as anything.”

“Yes, that must have been delightful,” agreed Uncle Samuel. “What's his
name?”

“We haven't given him one yet. Wouldn't you think of one, Uncle Samuel?”

The uncle considered the dog. The dog, with grave and scornful eyes,
considered the uncle.

“Well, if you really ask me,” said that gentleman, “if you name him by
his character I should say Hamlet would be as good as anything.”

“What's Hamlet?” asked Jeremy.

“He isn't anything just now. But he was a prince who Was unhappy because
he thought so much about himself.”

“Hamlet'll do,” said Jeremy comfortably. “I've never heard of a dog
called that, but it's easy to say.”

“Well, I must go,” said Uncle Samuel, making one of his usual sudden
departures. “Glad to have seen the animal. Good-bye.”

He vanished.

“Hamlet,” repeated Jeremy thoughtfully. “I wonder whether he'll like
that-”

His attention, however, was caught by the Jampot's sudden outburst.

“All of them,” she cried, “supporting you in your wickedness and
disobedience. I won't 'ave it nor endure it not a minute longer. They
can 'ave my notice this moment, and I won't take it back, not if they
ask me on their bended knees--no, I won't--and that's straight.”

For an instant she frowned upon them all--then she was gone, the door
banging after her.

They gazed at one another.

There was a dreadful silence. Once Mary whispered: “Suppose she really
does.”

Hamlet only was unmoved.

Ten minutes later, Rose, the housemaid, entered with the tea-things. For
a little she was silent. Then the three faces raised to hers compelled
her confidence.

“Nurse has been and given notice,” she said, “and the Missis has
taken it. She's going at the end of the month. She's crying now in the
kitchen.”

They were alone again. Mary and Helen looked at Jeremy as though waiting
to follow his lead. He did not know what to say. There was Tragedy,
there was Victory, there was Remorse, there was Triumph. He was sorry,
he was glad. His eyes fell upon Hamlet, who was now stretched out upon
the rug, his nose between his paws, fast asleep.

Then he looked at his sisters.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it's awfully nice to have a dog--anyway.”

Such is the true and faithful account of Hamlet's entrance into the
train of the Coles.




CHAPTER III. CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME


I


I am sometimes inclined to wonder whether, in very truth, those
Polchester Christmases of nearly thirty years ago were so marvellous
as now in retrospect they seem. I can give details of those splendours,
facts and figures, that to the onlooker are less than nothing at all--a
sugar elephant in a stocking, a box of pencils on a Christmas tree,
“Hark, the Herald Angels...” at three in the morning below one's window,
a lighted plum-pudding, a postman four hours late, his back bent with
bursting parcels. And it is something further--behind the sugar cherries
and the paper caps and the lighted tree--that remains to give magic
to those days; a sense of expectancy, a sense of richness, a sense of
worship, a visit from the Three Kings who have so seldom come to visit
one since.

That Christmas of Jeremy's ninth year was one of the best that he ever
had; it was perhaps the last of the MAGICAL Christmases. After this he
was to know too much, was to see Father Christmas vanish before a sum
in arithmetic, and a stocking change into something that “boys who go
to school never have”--the last of the Christmases of divine magic, when
the snow fell and the waits sang and the stockings were filled and the
turkey fattened and the candles blazed and the holly crackled by the
will of God rather than the power of man. It would be many years before
he would realise that, after all, in those early days he had been
right...

A very fat book could be written about all that had happened during that
wonderful Christmas, how Hamlet the Dog caught a rat to his own immense
surprise; how the Coles' Christmas dinner was followed by a play acted
with complete success by the junior members of the family, and it was
only Mr. Jellybrand the curate who disapproved; how Aunt Amy had a new
dress in which, by general consent, she looked ridiculous; how Mary,
owing to the foolish kindness of Mrs. Bartholomew, the Precentor's wife,
was introduced to the works of Charlotte Mary Yonge and became quite
impossible in consequence; how Miss Maple had a children's party at
which there was nothing to eat, so that all the children cried with
disappointment, and one small boy (the youngest son of the Precentor)
actually bit Miss Maple; how for two whole days it really seemed that
there would be skating on The Pool, and everyone bought skates, and
then, of course, the ice broke, and so on, and so on... there is no end
to the dramatic incidents of that great sensational time.

The theme that I sing, however, is Jeremy's Progress, and although even
Hamlet's catching of a rat influenced his development, there was one
incident of this Christmas that stands out and away from all the others,
an affair that he will never all his days forget, and that even now, at
this distance of time and experience, causes his heart to beat roughly
with the remembered excitement and pleasure.

Several weeks before Christmas there appeared upon the town walls
and hoardings the pictured announcements of the approaching visit to
Polchester of Denny's Great Christmas Pantomime “Dick Whittington.”
 Boxing Night was to see the first performance at our Assembly Rooms,
and during every afternoon and evening of the next three weeks this
performance was to be repeated.

A pantomime had, I believe, never visited our town before; there had, of
course, for many years been the Great Christmas Pantomime at the Theatre
Royal, Drymouth, but in those days trains were not easy, and if you
wished to attend an afternoon performance at the Drymouth Theatre you
must rise very early in the morning by the candle-light and return late
in the evening, with the cab forgetting to meet you at the station as
commanded, and the long walk up Orange Street, and a headache and a bad
temper next day.

It happened naturally then that the majority of the Polchester children
had never set their inquisitive noses within the doors of a theatre, and
although the two eldest daughters of the Dean, aged ten and eleven, had
been once to London and to Drury Lane Theatre, their sense of glory and
distinction so clouded their powers of accuracy and clarity that we were
no nearer, by their help and authority, to the understanding of what a
pantomime might really be.

I can myself recall the glory of those “Dick Whittington” pictures. Just
above Martin's the pastry-cook's (where they sold lemon biscuits),
near the Cathedral, there was a big wooden hoarding, and on to this was
pasted a marvellous representation of Dick and his Cat dining with the
King of the Zanzibar Islands. The King, a Mulatto, sat with his court
in a hall with golden pillars, and the rats were to be seen flying in a
confused flood towards the golden gates, whilst Dick, in red plush and
diamond buckles, stood in dignified majesty, the Cat at his side. There
was another wonderful picture of Dick asleep at the Cross Roads, fairies
watching over him, and London Town in a lighted purple distance--and
another of the streets of Old London with a comic fat serving man,
diamond-paned windows, cobblestones and high pointing eaves to the
houses.

Jeremy saw these pictures for the first time during one of his afternoon
walks, and returned home in such a state of choking excitement that
he could not drink his tea. As was ever his way he was silent and
controlled about the matter, asked very few questions, and although
he talked to himself a little did not disturb the general peace of the
nursery. On Mary and Helen the effect of the posters had been less. Mary
was following the adventures of the May family in “The Daisy Chain,” and
Helen was making necklaces for herself out of a box of beads that had
been given her.

When Jeremy said once, “Who was the man in the red trousers with gold
on them?” no one paid any attention save Hamlet, who wagged his tail,
looked wise and growled a little.

Who indeed could tell how he ached and longed and desired He had a very
vague idea as to the nature of a play; they had often dressed up at home
and pretended to be different things and people, and, of course, he knew
by heart the whole history of Dick Whittington, but this knowledge
and experience did not in the least force him to realise that this
performance of Mr. Denny's was simply a larger, more developed “dressing
up” and pretending. In some mysterious but nevertheless direct fashion
Dick Whittington was coming to Polchester. It was just as he had
heard for a long time of the existence of Aunt Emily who lived in
Manchester--and then one day she appeared in a black bonnet and a shawl,
and gave them wet kisses and sixpence apiece.

Dick Whittington was coming, having perhaps heard that Polchester was
a very jolly place. So might come any day Jack of the Beanstalk,
Cinderella, Queen Victoria, and God.

There were questions meanwhile that he would like to ask, but he was
already a victim to that properly English fear of making a fool of
himself, so he asked nothing. He dragged out his toy village and
tried to make it a bridge in his imagination between the nursery and
Whittington's world. As the village opened a door from the nursery, so
might Whittington open a door from the village.

He considered Hamlet and wondered whether he knew anything about it.
Hamlet, in spite of his mongrel appearance, was a very clever dog. He
had his especial corners in the garden, the kitchen and the nursery. He
never misbehaved, was never in the way, and was able to amuse himself
for hours together. Although he attached himself quite deliberately to
Jeremy, he did this in no sentimental fashion, and in his animosities
towards the Jampot, Aunt Amy and the boy who helped with the boots and
the knives, he was always restrained and courteous. He did indeed
growl at Aunt Amy, but always with such a sense of humour that everyone
(except Aunt Amy) was charmed, and he never actually supported the
children in their rebellions against the Jampot, although you could see
that he liked and approved of such things. The Jampot hated him with a
passion that caused the nursery to quiver with emotion. Was he not the
cause of her approaching departure, his first appearance having led her
into a tempest of passion that had caused her to offer a “notice” that
she had never for an instant imagined would be accepted? Was he not a
devilish dog who, with, his quiet movements and sly expressions, was
more than human? “Mark my words,” she said in the kitchen, “there's
a devil in that there animal, and so they'll find before they're many
years older--'Amlet indeed--a 'eathenish name and a 'eathenish beast.”

Her enemy had discovered that in one corner of the nursery there were
signs and symbols that witnessed to something in the nature of a
mouse or a rat. That nursery corner became the centre of all his more
adventurous instincts. It happened to be just the corner where the
Jampot kept her sewing machine, and you would think, if you came to the
nursery as a stranger, and saw him sitting, his eyes fixed beamingly
upon the machine, his tail erect, and his body here and there quivering
a little, that from duties of manly devotion he was protecting the
Jampot's property. She knew better; she regarded, in some undefined way,
this continued contemplation by him of her possessions as an ironical
insult. She did everything possible to drive him from the corner; he
inevitably returned, and as he always delicately stepped aside when she
approached, it could not be said that he was in her way. Once she struck
him; he looked at her in such a fashion that “her flesh crept.”... She
never struck him again.

For Jeremy he became more and more of a delight. He understood so
much. He sympathised, he congratulated, he sported, always at the right
moment. He would sit gravely at Jeremy's feet, his body pressed against
Jeremy's leg, one leg stuck out square, his eyes fixed inquisitively
upon the nursery scene. He would be motionless; then suddenly some
thought would electrify him--his ears would cock, his eyes shine,
his nose quiver, his tail tumble. The crisis would pass; he would be
composed once more. He would slide down to the floor, his whole body
collapsing; his head would rest upon Jeremy's foot; he would dream of
cats, of rats, of birds, of the Jampot, of beef and gravy, of sugar, of
being washed, of the dogs' Valhalla, of fire and warmth, of Jeremy, of
walks when every piece of flying paper was a challenge, of dogs, dogs
that he had known of when he was a puppy, of doing things he shouldn't,
of punishment and wisdom, pride and anger, of love-affairs of his youth,
of battle, of settling-down, of love-affairs in the future, again of
cats and beef, and smells--smells--smells, again of Jeremy, whom he
loved. And Jeremy, watching him now, thus sleeping, and thinking of Dick
Whittington, wondered why it was that a dog would understand so easily,
without explanations, the thoughts and desires he had, and that
all grown-up people would not understand, and would demand so many
explanations, and would laugh at one, and pity one, and despise one. Why
was it? he asked himself.

“I know,” he suddenly cried, turning upon Helen; “it can be your
birthday treat!”

“What can?” she asked.

“Why, going to Dick Whittington--all of us.”

Helen had, most unfortunately for herself, a birthday only a week after
Christmas, the result being that, in her own opinion at any rate,
she never received “proper presents” on either of those two great
present-giving occasions. She was always allowed, however, a “treat”;
her requests were generally in the nature of food; once of a ride in the
train; once even a visit to the Polchester Museum... It was difficult in
those days to find “treats” in Polchester.

“Oh, do you think they'd let us?” she said, her eyes wide.

“We can try,” said Jeremy. “I heard Aunt Amy say the other day that she
didn't think it was right for children to see acting, and Mother always
does the opposite to what Aunt Amy says, so p'r'aps it will be all
right. I wish Hamlet could go,” he added.

“Don't be silly!” said Helen.

“It isn't silly,” Jeremy said indignantly. “It's all about a cat,
anyway, and he'd love to see all the rats and things. He wouldn't bark
if we told him not to, and I held his collar.”

“If Aunt Amy sat next him he would,” said Mary.

“Oh, bother Aunt Amy,” said Jeremy.

After this Helen needed a great deal of urging; but she heard that Lucy
and Angela, the aforesaid daughters of the Dean, were going, and the
spirit of rivalry drove her forward.

It happened that the Dean himself one day said something to Mr. Cole
about “supporting a very praiseworthy effort. They are presenting,
I understand, the proceeds of the first performance to the Cathedral
Orphanage.”

Helen was surprised at the readiness with which her request was granted.

“We'll all go,” said Mr. Cole, in his genial, pastoral fashion. “Good
for us... good for us... to see the little ones laugh. .. good for us
all.”

Only Uncle Samuel said “that nothing would induce him--”




II


I pass swiftly over Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after,
although I should like to linger upon these sumptuous dates. Jeremy had
a sumptuous time; Hamlet had a sumptuous time (a whole sugar rat, plates
and plates of bones, and a shoe of Aunt Amy's); Mary and Helen had
sumptuous times in their own feminine fashion.

Upon the evening of Christmas Eve, when the earth was snow-lit, and
the street-lamps sparkled with crystals, and the rime on the doorsteps
crackled beneath one's feet, Jeremy accompanied his mother on a
present-leaving expedition. The excitement of that! The wonderful shapes
and sizes of the parcels, the mysterious streets, the door-handles and
the door-bells, the glittering stars, the maidservants, the sense of the
lighted house, as though you opened a box full of excitements and then
hurriedly shut the lid down again. Jeremy trembled and shook, not with
cold, but with exalting, completely satisfying happiness.

There followed the Stocking, the Waits, the Carols, the Turkey, the
Christmas Cake, the Tree, the Presents, Snapdragon, Bed... There
followed Headache, Ill-temper, Smacking of Mary, Afternoon Walk, Good
Temper again, Complete Weariness, Hamlet sick on the Golden Cockatoos,
Hamlet Beaten, Five minutes with Mother downstairs, Bed. .. Christmas
was over.

From that moment of the passing of Boxing Day it was simply the counting
of the minutes to “Dick Whittington.” Six days from Boxing Day. Say you
slept from eight to seven--eleven hours; that left thirteen hours; six
thirteen hours was, so Helen said, seventy-eight. Seventy-eight hours,
and Sunday twice as long as the other days, and that made thirteen more;
ninety-one, said Helen, her nose in the air.

The week dragged along, very difficult work for everybody, and even
Hamlet felt the excitement and watched his corner with the Jampot's
sewing machine in it with more quivering intensity than ever. The Day
Before The Day arrived, the evening before The Day, the last supper
before The Day, the last bed before The Day... Suddenly, like a
Jack-in-the-Box, The Day itself.

Then the awful thing happened.

Jeremy awoke to the consciousness that something terrific was about to
occur. He lay for a minute thinking--then he was up, running about the
nursery floor as though he were a young man in Mr. Rossetti's poetry
shouting: “Helen! Mary! Mary! Helen!... It's Dick Whittington! Dick
Whittington!”

On such occasions he lost entirely his natural reserve and caution. He
dressed with immense speed, as though that would hasten the coming of
the evening. He ran into the nursery, carrying the black tie that went
under his sailor-collar.

He held it out to the Jampot, who eyed him with disfavour. She was
leaving them all in a week and was a strange confusion of sentiment and
bad temper, love and hatred, wounded pride and injured dignity.

“Nurse. Please. Fasten it,” he said impatiently.

“And that's not the way to speak, Master Jeremy, and well you know it,”
 she said. “'Ave you cleaned your teeth?”

“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. It was not until the word was
spoken that he realised that he had not. He flushed. The Jampot eyed him
with a sudden sharp suspicion. He was then and ever afterwards a very
bad hand at a lie...

He would have taken the word back, he wanted to take it back--but
something held him as though a stronger than he had placed his hand over
his mouth. His face flamed.

“You've truly cleaned them?” she said.

“Yes, truly,” he answered, his eyes on the ground. Never was there a
more obvious liar in all the world.

She said no more; he moved to the fireplace. His joy was gone. There
was a cold clammy sensation about his heart. Slowly, very slowly, the
consciousness stole upon him that he was a liar. He had not thought it a
lie when he had first spoken, now he knew.

Still there was time. Had he turned round and spoken, all might still
have been well. But now obstinacy held him. He was not going to give the
Jampot an opportunity for triumphing over him. After all, he would clean
them so soon as she went to brush Helen's hair. In a moment what he had
said would be true.

But he was miserable. Hamlet came up from the nether regions where
he had spent the night, showing his teeth, wagging his tail, and even
rolling on the cockatoos. Jeremy paid no attention. The weight in his
heart grew heavier and heavier. He watched, from under his eyelids, the
Jampot. In a moment she must go into Helen's room. But she did not. She
stayed for a little arranging the things on the breakfast-table--then
suddenly, without a word, she turned into Jeremy's bedchamber. His heart
began to hammer. There was an awful pause; he heard from miles away
Mary's voice: “Do do that button, Helen, I can't get it!” and Helen's
“Oh, bother!”

Then, like Judgment, the Jampot appeared again. She stood in the
doorway, looking across at him.

“You 'ave not cleaned your teeth, Master Jeremy,” she said. “The glass
isn't touched, nor your toothbrush... You wicked, wicked boy. So it's a
liar you've become, added on to all your other wickedness.”

“I forgot,” he muttered sullenly. “I thought I had.”

She smiled the smile of approaching triumph.

“No, you did not,” she said. “You knew you'd told a lie. It was in your
face. All of a piece--all of a piece.”

The way she said this, like a pirate counting over his captured
treasure, was enraging. Jeremy could feel the wild fury at himself, at
her, at the stupid blunder of the whole business rising to his throat.

“If you think I'm going to let this pass you're making a mighty
mistake,” she continued, “which I wouldn't do not if you paid me all the
gold in the kingdom. I mayn't be good enough to keep my place and look
after such as you, but anyways I'm able to stop your lying for another
week or two. I know my duty even though there's them as thinks I don't.”

She positively snorted, and the excitement of her own vindication and
the just condemnation of Jeremy was such that her hands trembled.

“I don't care what you do,” Jeremy shouted. “You can tell anyone you
like. I don't care what you do. You're a beastly woman.”

She turned upon him, her face purple. “That's enough, Master Jeremy,”
 she said, her voice low and trembling. “I'm not here to be called names
by such as you. You'll be sorry for this before you're much older....
You see.”

There was then an awful and sickly pause. Jeremy seemed to himself to
be sinking lower and lower into a damp clammy depth of degradation. What
must this world be that it could change itself so instantly from a place
of gay and happy pleasure into a dim groping room of punishment and
dismay?

His feelings were utterly confused. He supposed that he was terribly
wicked. But he did not feel wicked. He only felt miserable, sick and
defiant. Mary and Helen came in, their eyes open to a crisis, their
bodies tuned sympathetically to the atmosphere of sin and crime that
they discerned around them.

Then Mr. Cole came in as was his daily habit--for a moment before his
breakfast.

“Well, here are you all,” he cried. “Ready for to-night? No breakfast
yet? Why, now...?”

Then perceiving, as all practised fathers instantly must, that the
atmosphere was sinful, he changed his voice to that of the Children's
Sunday Afternoon Service--a voice well known in his family.

“Please, sir,” began the Jampot, “I'm sorry to 'ave to tell you, sir,
that Master Jeremy's not been at all good this morning.”

“Well, Jeremy,” he said, turning to his son, “what is it?”

Jeremy's face, raised to his father's, was hard and set and sullen.

“I've told a lie,” he said; “I said I'd cleaned my teeth when I hadn't.
Nurse went and looked, and then I called her a beastly woman.”

The Jampot's face expressed a grieved and at the same time triumphant
confirmation of this.

“You told a lie?” Mr. Cole's voice was full of a lingering sorrow.

“Yes,” said Jeremy.

“Are you sorry?”

“I'm sorry that I told a lie, but I'm not sorry I called Nurse a beastly
woman.”

“Jeremy!”

“No, I'm not. She is a beastly woman.”

Mr. Cole was always at a loss when anyone defied him, even though it
were only a small boy of eight. He took refuge now in his ecclesiastical
and parental authority.

“I'm very distressed--very distressed indeed. I hope that punishment,
Jeremy, will show you how wrong you have been. I'm afraid you cannot
come with us to the Pantomime to-night.”

At that judgement a quiver for an instant held Jeremy's face, turning
it, for that moment, into something shapeless and old. His heart had
given a wild leap of terror and dismay. But he showed no further sign.
He simply stood there waiting.

Mr. Cole was baffled, as he always was by Jeremy's moods, so he
continued:

“And until you've apologised to Nurse for your rudeness you must remain
by yourself. I shall forbid your sisters to speak to you. Mary and
Helen, you are not to speak to your brother until he has apologised to
Nurse.”

“Yes, Father,” said Helen

“Oh, Father, mayn't he come to-night?” said Mary.

“No, Mary, I'm afraid not.”

A tear rolled down her cheek. “It won't be any fun without Jeremy,” she
said. She wished to make the further sacrifice of saying that she would
not go unless Jeremy did, but some natural caution restrained her.

Mr. Cole, his face heavy with sorrow, departed. At the dumb misery of
Jeremy's face the Jampot's hear--in reality a kind and even sentimental
heart--repented her.

“There, Master Jeremy, you be a good boy all day, and I dare say your
father will take you, after all; and we won't think no more about what
you said to me in the 'eat of the moment.”

But Jeremy answered nothing; nor did he respond to the smell of bacon,
nor the advances of Hamlet, nor the flood of sunlight that poured into
the room from the frosty world outside.

A complete catastrophe. They none of them had wanted to see this thing
with the urgent excitement that he had felt. They had not dreamt of it
for days and nights and nights and days, as he had done. Their whole
future existence did not depend upon their witnessing this, as did his.

During that morning he was a desperate creature, like something caged
and tortured. Do happy middle-aged philosophers assure us that children
are light-hearted and unfeeling animals? Let them realise something of
the agony which Jeremy suffered that day. His whole world had gone.

He was wicked, an outcast; his word could never be trusted again; he
would be pointed at, as the boy who had told a lie... And he would not
meet Dick Whittington.

The eternity of his punishment hung around his neck like an iron chain.
Childhood's tragedies are terrible tragedies, because a child has no
sense of time; a moment's dismay is eternal; a careless word from an
elder is a lasting judgment; an instant's folly is a lifetime's mistake.

The day dragged its weary length along, and he scarcely moved from his
corner by the fire. He did not attempt conversation with anyone. Once or
twice the Jampot tried to penetrate behind that little mask of anger and
dismay.

“Come, now, things aren't so bad as all that. You be a good boy, and
go and tell your father you're sorry...” or “Well, then, Master Jeremy,
there'll be another time, I dare say, you can go to the the-ayter...”

But she found no response. If there was one thing that she hated, it was
sulks. Here they were, sulks of the worst--and so, like many wiser
than herself, she covered up with a word a situation that she did not
understand, and left it at that.

The evening came on; the curtains were drawn. Tea arrived; still Jeremy
sat there, not speaking, not raising his eyes, a condemned creature.
Mary and Helen and Hamlet had had a wretched day. They all sympathised
with him.

The girls went to dress. Seven o'clock struck. They were taken
downstairs by Nurse, who had her evening out. Rose, the housemaid, would
sit with Master Jeremy.

Doors closed, doors opened, voices echoed, carriage-wheels were heard.

Jeremy and Hamlet were left to themselves...




III


The last door had closed, and the sudden sense that everyone had gone
and that he might behave now as he pleased, removed the armour in which
all day he had encased himself.

He raised his head, looked about the deserted nursery, and then, with
the sudden consciousness of that other lighted and busied place where
Whittington was pursuing his adventures, he burst into tears. He sobbed,
his head down upon his arms, and his body squeezed together so that his
knees were close to his nose and his hair in his boots. Hamlet
restored him to himself. Instead of assisting his master's grief, as a
sentimental dog would have done, by sighing or sniffing or howling, he
yawned, stretched himself, and rolled on the carpet. He did not
believe in giving way to feelings, and he was surprised, and perhaps
disappointed, at Jeremy's lack of restraint.

Jeremy felt this, and in a little while sobs came very slowly, and at
last were only little shudders, rather pleasant and healthy. He looked
about him, rubbed his red nose with a hideously dirty handkerchief, and
felt immensely sleepy.

No, he would not cry any more. Rose would shortly appear, and he did
not intend to cry before housemaids. Nevertheless, his desolation was
supreme. He was a liar. He had told lies before, but they had not been
discovered, and so they were scarcely lies... Now, in some strange way,
the publication of his lie had shown him what truly impossible things
lies were. He had witnessed this effect upon the general public; he
had not believed that he was so wicked. He did not even now feel really
wicked, but he saw quite clearly that there was one world for liars and
one for truthful men. He wanted, terribly badly, someone to tell him
that he was still in the right world...

And then, on the other side, the thought that Mary and Helen were at
this very moment witnessing the coloured history of Dick Whittinglon,
the history that he had pursued ceaselessly during all these days and
nights--that picture of them all in the lighted theatre--once more
nearly overcame him. But he pulled himself together.

He sniffed, left his dirty handkerchief, and went slowly and sorrowfully
to drag out his toy village from its corner and see whether anything
could be done with it.... After all, he was going to school in
September. His punishment could not be quite limitless. Hamlet had just
shown his approval of this manly conduct by strolling up and sniffing
at the Noah family, who were, as usual, on their way to church, when the
door suddenly opened, and in came Uncle Samuel.

Jeremy had forgotten his uncle, and now blinked up at him from the
floor, where he was squatting, rather ashamed of his swollen eyes and
red nose.

Uncle Samuel, however, had no time for details; he was apparently in
a hurry. He did not wear his blue painting-smock, but was in a
comparatively clean black suit, and on the back of his head was a
squashy brown hat.

“Come on,” he said, “or we shall be too late.”

Jeremy choked. “Too late?” he repeated.

“You're coming, aren't you--to the Pantomime? They sent me back for
you.”

The room suddenly got on to its legs, like the food and the families
during Alice's feast in the “Looking Glass,” and swung round, lurching
from side to side, and causing the fire to run into the gas and the gas
to fly out of the window.

“I--don't--understand,” Jeremy stammered.

“Well, if you don't understand in half a shake,” said Uncle Samuel,
“you won't see any of the show at all. Go on. Wash your face. There are
streaks of dirt all down it as though you were a painted Indian; stick
on your cap and coat and boots and come along.”

Exactly as one moves in sleep so Jeremy now moved. He had once had a
wonderful dream, in which he had been at a meal that included every
thing that he had most loved--fish-cakes, sausages, ices, strawberry
jam, sponge-cake, chocolates, and scrambled eggs--and he had been
able to eat, and eat, and had never been satisfied, and had never felt
sick--a lovely dream.

He often thought of it. And now in the same bewildering fashion he found
his boots and cap and coat and then, deliberately keeping from him the
thought of the Pantomime lest he should suddenly wake up, he said:

“I'm ready, Uncle.”

Samuel Trefusia looked at him.

“You're a strange kid,” he said; “you take everything so quietly--but,
thank God, I don't understand children.”

“There's Hamlet,” said Jeremy, wondering whether perhaps the dream would
extend to his friend. “I suppose he can't come too.”

“No, he certainly can't,” said Uncle Samuel grimly.

“And there's Rose. She'll wonder where I've gone.”

“I've told her. Don't you worry. What a conscientious infant you are.
Just like your father. Anything else?”

“No,” said Jeremy breathlessly, and nearly murdered himself going
downstairs because he shut his eyes in order to continue the dream
so long as it was possible. Then in the cold night air, grasping his
uncle's hand with a feverish hold, he stammered:

“Is it really true? Are we going--really?”

“Of course we're going. Come on--step out or you'll miss the Giant.”

“But--but--oh!” he drew a deep breath. “Then they don't think me a liar
any more?”

“They--who?”

“Father and Mother and everyone.”

“Don't you think about them. You'd better enjoy yourself.”

“But you said you wouldn't go to the Pantomime--not for anything?”

“Well, I've changed my mind. Don't talk so much. You know I hate you
children chattering. Always got something to say.”

So Jeremy was silent. They raced down Orange Street, Jeremy being
almost carried off his feet. This was exactly like a dream. This rushing
movement and the way that the lamp-posts ran up to you as though they
were going to knock you down, and the way that the stars crackled and
sputtered and trembled overhead. But Uncle Samuel's hand was flesh and
blood, and the heel of Jeremy's right shoe hurt him and he felt the
tickle of his sailor-collar at the back of his neck, just as he did when
he was awake.

Then there they were at the Assembly Rooms door, Jeremy having become
so breathless that Uncle Samuel had to hold him up for a moment or he'd
have fallen.

“Bit too fast for you, was it? Well, you shouldn't be so fat. You eat
too much. Now we're not going to sit with your father and mother--there
isn't room for you there. So don't you go calling out to them or
anything. We're sitting in the back and you'd better be quiet or they'll
turn you out.”

“I'll be quiet,” gasped Jeremy.

Uncle Samuel paused at a lighted hole in the wall and spoke to a large
lady in black silk who was drinking a cup of tea. Jeremy caught the
jingle of money. Then they moved forward, stumbling in the dark up a
number of stone steps, pushing at a heavy black curtain, then suddenly
bathed in a bewildering glow of light and scent and colour.

Jeremy's first impression, as he fell into this new world, was of an
ugly, harsh, but funny voice crying out very loudly indeed: “Oh, my
great aunt! Oh, my great aunt! Oh, my great aunt!” A roar of laughter
rose about him, almost lifting him off his feet, and close to his car a
Glebeshire voice sobbed: “Eh, my dear. Poor worm! Poor worm!”

He was aware then of a strong smell of oranges, of Uncle Samuel pushing
him forward, of stumbling over boots, knees, and large hands that were
clapping in his very nose, of falling into a seat and then clinging to
it as though it was his only hope in this strange puzzling world. The
high funny voice rose again: “Oh, my great aunt! Oh, my great aunt!” And
again it was followed by the rough roar of delighted laughter.

He was aware then that about him on every side gas was sizzling, and
then, as he recovered slowly his breath, his gaze was drawn to the great
blaze of light in the distance, against which figures were dimly moving,
and from the heart of which the strange voice came. He heard a woman's
voice, then several voices together; then suddenly the whole scene
shifted into focus, his eyes were tied to the light; the oranges and
the gas and the smell of clothes and heated bodies slipped back into
distance--he was caught into the world where he had longed to be.

He saw that it was a shop--and he loved shops. His heart beat thickly as
his eyes travelled up and up and up over the rows and rows of shelves;
here were bales of cloth, red and green and blue; carpets from the East,
table-covers, sheets and blankets. Behind the long yellow counters young
men in strange clothes were standing. In the middle of the scene was
a funny old woman, her hat tumbling off her head, her shabby skirt
dragging, large boots, and a red nose. It was from this strange creature
that the deep ugly voice proceeded. She had, this old woman, a number of
bales of cloth under her arms, and she tried to carry them all, but one
slipped, and then another, and then another; she bent to pick them up
and her hat fell off; she turned for her hat and all the bales tumbled
together. Jeremy began to laugh--everyone laughed; the strange voice
came again and again, lamenting, bewailing, she had secured one bale, a
smile of cautious triumph began to spread over her ugly face, then the
bales all fell again, and once more she was on her knees. It was then
that her voice or some movement brought to Jeremy's eyes so vividly
the figure of their old gardener, Jordan, that he turned round to Uncle
Samuel, and suddenly grasping that gentleman's fat thigh, exclaimed
convulsively: “Why, she's a man!”

What a strange topsy-turvy world this was in which women were men, and
shops turned (as with a sudden creaking and darkness and clattering did
this one) into gardens by the sea. Jeremy drew his breath deeply and
held on. His mouth was open and his hair on end.. .

It is impossible to define exactly Jeremy's ultimate impression as
the entertainment proceeded. Perhaps he had no ultimate impression. It
cannot in reality have been a very wonderful Pantomime. Even at Drury
Lane thirty years back there were many things that they did not know,
and it is not likely that a touring company fitted into so inadequate
an old building as our Assembly Rooms would have provided anything very
fine. But Jeremy will never again discover so complete a realisation
for his illusions. Whatever failures in the presentation there were, he
himself made good.

As a finale to the first half of the entertainment there was given
Dick's dream at the Cross-Roads. He lay on the hard ground, his head
upon his bundle, the cat as large as he watching sympathetically beside
him. In the distance were the lights of London, and then, out of the
half dusk, fairies glittering with stars and silver danced up and
down the dusky road whilst all the London bells rang out “Turn again,
Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.”

Had Jeremy been of the age and wisdom of Uncle Samuel he would have
discovered that Dick was a stout lady and probably the mother of a
growing family; that the fairies knew as much about dancing as the
Glebeshire wives sitting on the bench behind; that the London bells
were two hand instruments worked by a youth in shirt sleeves behind the
scenes so energetically that the High Road and the painted London blew
backwards and forwards in sympathy with his movements. Jeremy, happily,
was not so worldly wise as his uncle. This scene created for him then a
tradition of imperishable beauty that would never fade again. The world
after that night would be a more magical place than it had ever been
before. “Turn again, Whittington” continued the education that the Toy
Village and Hamlet had already advanced.

When the gas rose once again, sizzling like crackling bacon, he was
white with excitement. The only remark that he made was: “It's much
better than the pictures outside Martin's, isn't it, Uncle Samuel?” to
which Uncle Samuel, who had been railing for weeks at the deflowering
of Polchester by those abominable posters, could truthfully reply, “Much
better.” Little by little he withdrew himself from the other world and
realised his own. He could see that he and his uncle were certainly not
amongst the Quality. Large ladies, their dresses tucked up over their
knees, sucked oranges. Country farmers with huge knobbly looking sticks
were there, and even some sailors, on their way probably to Drymouth.
He recognised the lady who kept charge of the small Orange Street
post-office, and waved to her with delighted excitement. The atmosphere
was thick with gas and oranges, and I'm afraid that Uncle Samuel must
have suffered a great deal. I can only put it on record that he, the
most selfish of human beings, never breathed a word of complaint.

They were all packed very closely together up there in the gallery,
where seventy years before an orchestra straight from Jane Austen's
novels had played to the dancing of the contemporaries of Elizabeth
Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, and the dear lady of “Persuasion.” Another
thirty-two years and that same gallery would be listening to recruiting
appeals and echoing the drums and fifes of a martial band. The best
times are always the old times. The huge lady in the seat next to Jeremy
almost swallowed him up, so that he peered out from under her thick
arm, and heard every crunch and crackle of the peppermints that she was
enjoying. He grew hotter and hotter, so that at last he seemed, as once
he had read in some warning tract about a greedy boy that Aunt Amy had
given him, “to swim in his own fat.” But he did not mind. Discomfort
only emphasised his happiness. Then, peering forward beneath that stout
black arm, he suddenly perceived, far below in the swimming distance,
the back of his mother, the tops of the heads of Mary and Helen, the
stiff white collar of his father, and the well-known coral necklace of
Aunt Amy. For a moment dismay seized him, the morning's lie which he
had entirely forgotten suddenly jumping up and facing him. But they had
forgiven him.

“Shall I wave to them?” he asked excitedly of Uncle Samuel.

“No, no,” said his uncle very hurriedly. “Nonsense. They wouldn't see
you if you did. Leave them alone.”

He felt immensely superior to them up where he was, and he wouldn't
have changed places with them for anything. He gave a little sigh of
satisfaction. “I could drop an orange on to Aunt Amy's head,” he said.
“Wouldn't she jump!”

“You must keep quiet,” said Uncle Samuel. “You're good enough as you
are.”

“I'd rather be here,” said Jeremy. “It's beautifully hot here and
there's a lovely smell.”

“There is,” said Uncle Samuel.

Then the gas went down, and the curtain went up, and Dick, now in a suit
of red silk with golden buttons, continued his adventures. I have not
space here to describe in detail the further events of his life--how,
receiving a telegram from the King of the Zanzibars about the plague of
rats, he took ship with his cat and Alderman Fitzwarren and his wife,
how they were all swallowed by a whale, cast up by a most lucky chance
on the Zanzibars, nearly cooked by the natives, and rescued by the King
of the Zanzibars' beautiful daughter, killed all the rats, were given a
huge feast, with dance and song, and finally Dick, although tempted by
the dusky Princess, refused a large fortune and returned to Alice of
Eastcheap, the true lady of his heart. There were, of course, many other
things, such as the aspirations and misadventures of Mrs. Fitzwarren,
the deep-voiced lady who had already so greatly amused Jeremy. And then
there was a Transformation Scene, in which roses turned into tulips and
tulips into the Hall of Gold, down whose blazing steps marched stout
representatives of all the nations.

It was in the middle of this last thrilling spectacle, when Jeremy's
heart was in his mouth and he was so deeply excited that he did not know
whether it were he or the lady next to him who was eating peppermints,
that his uncle plucked him by the sleeve and said in his ear: “Come on.
It's close on the end. We must go.”

Jeremy very reluctantly got up, and stumbled out over knees and legs and
exclamations like:

“There's Japan!” “No, it ain't; it's Chiney!” “You's a fine, hearty
young woman!” and so on. He was dragged through the black curtain, down
the stone steps, and into the street.

“But it wasn't the end,” he said.

“It will be in one minute,” said his uncle. “And I want us to get home
first.”

“Why?” said Jeremy.

“Never you mind. Come on; we'll race it.”

They arrived home breathless, and then, once again in the old familiar
hall, Uncle Samuel said:

“Now you nip up to the nursery, and then they'll never know you've been
out at all.”

“Never know?” said Jeremy. “But you said they'd sent for me.”

“Well,” said Uncle Samuel, “that wasn't exactly true. As a matter of
fact, they don't know you were there.”

“Oh!” said Jeremy, the corner of his mouth turning down. “Then I've told
a lie again!”

“Nonsense!” said Uncle Samuel impatiently. “It wasn't you; it was I.”

“And doesn't it matter your telling lies?” asked Jeremy.

The answer to this difficult question was, happily for Uncle Samuel,
interrupted by the arrival of the household, who had careened up Orange
Street in a cab.

When Mr. and Mrs. Cole saw Jeremy standing in the hall, his great coat
still on and his muffler round his neck, there was a fine scene of
wonder and amazement.

Uncle Samuel explained. “It was my fault. I told him you'd forgiven him
and sent for him to come, after all. He's in an awful state now that you
shouldn't forgive him.”

Whatever they thought of Uncle Samuel, this was obviously neither the
time nor the place to speak out. Mrs. Cole looked at her son. His body
defiant, sleepy, excited. His mouth was obstinate, but his eyes appealed
to her on the scene of the common marvellous experience that they had
just enjoyed.

She hugged him.

“And you won't tell a lie again, will you, Jeremy, dear?”

“Oh, no!” And then, hurrying on: “And when the old woman tumbled
down the steps, Mother, wasn't it lovely? And the fairies in Dick
Whittington's sleep, and when the furniture all fell all over the
place--”

He went slowly upstairs to the nursery, the happiest boy in the kingdom.
But through all his happiness there was this puzzle: Uncle Samuel had
told a lie, and no one had thought that it mattered. There were good
lies and bad ones then. Or was it that grown-up people could tell lies
and children mustn't?...

He tumbled into the warm, lighted nursery half asleep. There was Hamlet
watching in front of the Jampot's sewing machine.

He would have things to think about for years and years and years...

There was the Jampot.

“I'm sorry I called you a beastly woman,” he said.

She sniffed.

“Well, I hope you'll be a good boy now,” she said.

“Oh, I'll be good,” he smiled. “But, Nurse, are there some people can
tell lies and others mustn't?”

“All them that tell lies goes to Hell,” said the Jampot. “And now,
Master Jeremy, come along and take your things off. It's past eleven,
and what you'll be like to-morrow--”




CHAPTER IV. MISS JONES


I


The coming of the new year meant the going of the Jampot, and the
going of the Jampot meant the breaking of a life-time's traditions. The
departure was depressing and unsettling; the weather was--as it always
is during January in Glebeshire--at its worst, and the Jampot, feeling
it all very deeply, maintained a terrible Spartan composure, which was
meant to show indifference and a sense of injustice. She had to the very
last believed it incredible that she should really go. She had been
in the old Orange Street house for eight years, and had intended to be
there until she died. She was forced to admit that Master Jeremy was
going beyond her; but in September he would go to school, and then she
could help with the sewing and other things about the house. The real
truth of the matter was that she had never been a very good servant,
having too much of the Glebeshire pride and independence and too little
of the Glebeshire fidelity.

Mrs. Cole had been glad of the opportunity that Hamlet's arrival in the
family had given her. The Jampot, only a week before the date of her
departure, came to her mistress and begged, with floods of tears, to
be allowed to continue in her service. But Mrs. Cole, with all her
placidity, was firm. The Jampot had to go.

I would like to paint a pleasant picture of the sentiment of the Cole
children on this touching occasion; something, perhaps, in the vein of
tragi-comedy with which Mr. Kenneth Graham embroiders a similar occasion
in his famous masterpiece--but in this case there was very little
sentiment and no tragedy at all. They did not think of the event
beforehand, and then when it suddenly occurred there was all the
excitement of being looked after by Rose, the housemaid, of having
a longer time with their mother in the evening, and, best of all,
a delightful walk with Aunt Amy, whose virginal peace of mind they
attacked from every possible quarter.

The Jampot left in a high state of sulks, declaring to the kitchen that
no woman had ever been so unfairly treated; that her married sister
Sarah Francis, of Rafiel, with whom she was now to live, should be told
all about it, and that the citizens of Rafiel should be compelled to
sympathise. The children were not unfeeling, but they hated the Jampot's
sulks, and while she waited in the nursery, longing for a word or
movement of affection, but wearing a face of stony disapproval, they
stood awkwardly beholding her, and aching for her to go. She was the
more unapproachable in that she wore her Sunday silks and a heavy black
bonnet with shiny rattling globes of some dark metal that nodded and
becked and bowed like live things. Hamlet, who had, of course, always
hated the Jampot, barked at this bonnet furiously, and would have bitten
at it had it been within his reach. She had meant to leave them all with
little sentences about life and morals; but the noise of the dog, the
indifference of the children, and the general air of impatience for her
departure strangled her aphorisms. Poor Jampot! She was departing to a
married sister who did not want her, and would often tell her so;
her prospects in life were not bright, and it is sad to think that no
inhabitant of the Orange Street house felt any sorrow at the sight of
the last gesticulating wave of her black bonnet as she stepped into the
old mouldy Polchester cab.

“The King is dead--long live the King!” The Jampot as a power in the
Cole family has ceased to be.

The day following the Jampot's departure offered up the news that, for
the first time in the history of the Coles, there was to be a governess.
The word “governess” had an awful sound, and the children trembled with
a mixture of delight and terror. Jeremy pretended indifference.

“It's only another woman,” he said. “She'll be like the Jampot--only, a
lady, so she won't be able to punish us as the Jampot could.”

I expect that Mr. and Mrs. Cole had great difficulty in finding anyone
who would do. Thirty years ago governesses were an incapable race, and
belonged too closely either to the Becky Sharp or the Amelia type to be
very satisfactory. It was then that the New Woman was bursting upon the
scene, but she was not to be found amongst the governesses. No one in
Polchester had learnt yet to cycle in rational costume, it was several
years before the publication of “The Heavenly Twins,” and Mr. Trollope's
Lilys and Lucys were still considered the ideal of England's maidenhood.
Mrs. Cole, therefore, had to choose between idiotic young women and
crabbed old maids, and she finally chose an old maid. I don't think that
Miss Jones was the very best choice that she could have made, but time
was short. Jeremy, aided by Hamlet, was growing terribly independent,
and Mr. Cole had neither the humour nor the courage to deal with him.
No, Miss Jones was not ideal, but the Dean had strongly recommended her.
It is true that the Dean had never seen her, but her brother, with whom
she had lived for many years, had once been the Dean's curate. It was
true that he had been a failure as a curate, but that made the Dean the
more anxious to be kind now to his memory, he--Mr. Jones--having just
died of general bad-temper and selfishness.

Miss Jones, buried during the last twenty years in the green depths of
a Glebeshire valley, found herself now, at the age of fifty, without
friends, without money, without relations. She thought that she would be
a governess.

The Dean recommended her, Mrs. Cole approved of her birth, education and
sobriety, Mr. Cole liked the severity of her countenance when she came
to call, and she was engaged.

“Jeremy needs a tight hand,” said Mr. Cole. “It's no use having a young
girl.”

“Miss Jones easily escapes that charge,” said Uncle Samuel, who had met
her in the hall.

The children were prepared to be good. Jeremy felt that it was time to
take life seriously. He put away his toy village, scolded Hamlet for
eating Mary's pincushion, and dragged out his dirty exercise-book in
which he did sums.

“I do hate sums!” he said, with a sigh, regarding the hideous smudges
of thumbs and tears that scored the page. “I shall never understand
anything about them.”

“I'll help you,” said Mary, who was greatly excited at the thought of a
governess. “We'll do them together.”

“No we won't,” said Jeremy, who hated to be dependent.

“I'll learn it myself--if only the paper didn't get dirty so quickly.”

“Mother says,” remarked Helen, “that she's had a very hard life, and no
one's ever been kind to her. 'She wants affection,' Mother says.”

“I'll give her my napkin-ring that you gave me last Christmas, Mary,”
 said Jeremy. “You don't mind, do you? It's all dirty now. I hope Hamlet
won't bark at her.”

Hamlet was worrying Mary's pincushion at the moment, holding it between
his paws, his body stretched out in quivering excitement, his short,
“snappy” tail, as Uncle Samuel called it, standing up straight in air.
He stopped for an instant when he heard his name, and shook one ear.

“Mother says,” continued Helen, “that she lived with a brother who never
gave her enough to eat.”

Jeremy opened his eyes. This seemed to him a horrible thing.

“She shall have my porridge, if she likes,” he said; “I don't like it
very much. And I'll give her that chocolate that Mr. Jellybrand sent us.
There's still some, although it's rather damp now, I expect.”

“How silly you are!” said Helen scornfully. “Of course, Mother will give
her anything she wants.”

“It isn't silly,” said Jeremy. “Perhaps she'll want more than she really
wants. I often do.”

“Oh, you!” said Helen.

“And if for ever so long,” said Jeremy, “she hasn't had enough to eat,
she'll want twice as big meals now as other people--to make up.”

“Mother says we've got to remember she's a lady,” said Helen.

“What's the difference,” asked Jeremy, “between a lady and not a lady?”

“Oh, you are!” said Helen. “Why, Aunt Amy's a lady, and Rose isn't.”

“Rose is nicer,” said Jeremy.

Miss Jones had, I am sorry to say, lied to Mrs. Cole in one particular.
She had told her that “she had had to do with children all her life,”
 the fact being that on several occasions some little cousins had come to
stay with herself and her brother. On these occasions the little
cousins had been so paralysed with terror that discipline had not been
difficult. It was from these experiences that Miss Jones flattered
herself that “she understood children.”

So audacious a self-confidence is doomed to invite the scornful
punishment of the gods.

Miss Jones arrived upon a wet January afternoon, one of those Glebeshire
days when the town sinks into a bath of mud and mist and all the pipes
run water and the eaves drip and horses splash and only ducks are happy.
Out of a blurred lamp-lit dusk stumbled Miss Jones's cab, and out of a
blurred unlit cab stumbled Miss Jones.

As she stood in the hall trying to look warm and amiable, Mrs. Cole's
heart forsook her. On that earlier day of her visit Miss Jones had
looked possible, sitting up in Mrs. Cole's drawing-room, smiling her
brightest, because she so desperately needed the situation, and wearing
her best dress. Now she was all in pieces; she had had to leave her
little village early in the morning to catch the village bus; she had
waited at wayside stations, as in Glebeshire only one can wait; the
world had dripped upon her head and spattered upon her legs. She had
neuralgia and a pain in her back; she had worn her older dress because,
upon such a day, it would not do to travel in her best; and then, as a
climax to everything, she had left her umbrella in the train. How she
could do such a thing upon such a day! Her memory was not her strongest
point, poor lady, and it was a good umbrella, and she could not afford
to buy another. Perhaps they would find it for her, but it was very
unlikely.

She had had it for a number of years.

She was a little woman, all skin and bone, with dried withered cheeks,
a large brown nose and protruding ears. Her face had formed severe lines
in self-defence against her brother, but her eyes were mild, and when
she smiled her mouth was rather pleasantly pathetic.

“Oh, she'll never do,” thought Mrs. Cole, as she looked at her dripping
in the hall.

“I can't think how I forgot it,” said the poor lady, her mind fixed upon
her umbrella. “They said that perhaps they would find it for me, but
there was a man in my carriage, I remember, who will most certainly have
taken it--and it was a nice one with a silver handle.”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Cole cheerfully, “I'm sure they'll find it. You
must come up to the nursery--or the schoolroom I suppose we must call
it now; there's a lovely fire there, and we'll both have tea with
the children to-day, so as to feel at home, all of us, as quickly as
possible.”

What Miss Jones wanted was to lie down on a bed in a dark room and try
and conquer her neuralgia. The thought of a lighted nursery filled her
with dismay. However, first impressions are so important. She pulled
herself together.

The children had heard the arrival; they waited in a bunch by the fire,
their eyes partly fixed on the door, partly on the strawberry jam that
they were allowed to-day as a treat in the new governess's honour.
Hamlet, his eyes and ears also upon the door, expecting perhaps a rat,
perhaps Aunt Amy, sat in front of the group, its bodyguard.

“She's in the hall,” said Helen, “and now Mother's saying: 'Do take off
your things. You must be wet,' and now she's saying: 'You'll like to see
the children, I expect,' and now--”

There they were, standing in the doorway, Mrs. Cole and Miss Jones.
There followed a dismal pause. The children had not expected anyone so
old and so ugly as Miss Jones. Hamlet did not bark--nothing occurred.

At last Mrs. Cole said: “Now, children, come and say, 'How do you do?'
to Miss Jones. This is Helen, our eldest--this Mary--and this Jeremy.”

Miss Jones did a dreadful thing. In her eagerness to be pleasant and
friendly she kissed the girls, and then, before anyone could stop her,
kissed Jeremy. He took it like a man, never turning his head nor wiping
his mouth with his hand afterwards, but she might have seen in his eyes,
had she looked, what he felt about it.

She said: “I hope we shall be happy together, dears.”

The children said nothing, and presently they all sat down to tea.




II


It was unfortunate that there was so little precedent on both sides.
Miss Jones had never been a governess before and the children had never
had one. Of course, many mistakes were made. Miss Jones had had a true
admiration for what she used to call “her brother's indomitable spirit,”
 her name for his selfishness and bad temper. She was herself neither
selfish nor bad-tempered, but she was ignorant, nervous, over-anxious,
and desperately afraid of losing her situation. She had during so many
years lived without affection that the wells of it had dried up within
her, and now, without being at all a bad old lady, she was simply
preoccupied with the business of managing her neuralgia, living
on nothing a week, and building to her deceased brother's memory a
monument, of heroic character and self-sacrifice. She was short-sighted
and had a perpetual cold; she was forgetful and careless. She had,
nevertheless, a real knowledge of many things, a warm heart somewhere
could she be encouraged to look for it again, and a sense of humour
buried deep beneath her cares and preoccupations. There were many worse
persons in the world than Miss Jones. But, most unfortunately, her
love for her brother's memory led her to resolve on what she called
“firmness.” Mrs. Cole had told her that Jeremy was “getting too much”
 for his nurse; she approached Jeremy with exactly the tremors and
quaking boldness that she would have summoned to her aid before a
bull loose in a field. She really did look frightening with her large
spectacles on the end of her large nose, her mouth firmly set, and a
ruler in her hand. “I insist on absolute obedience,” was her motto.
Jeremy looked at her but said no word. It was made clear to them all
that the new regime was to be far other than the earlier nursery one.
There were to be regular lesson hours--nine to twelve and four to five.
A neat piece of white paper was fastened to the wall with “Monday:
Geography 9-10, Arithmetic 10-11,” and so on. A careful graduation of
punishments was instituted, copies to be written so many times, standing
on a chair, three strokes on the hand with a ruler, and, worst of all,
standing in the corner wearing a paper Dunce's cap. (This last she had
read of in books.) At first Jeremy had every intention of behaving well,
in spite of that unfortunate embrace. He was proud of his advance in
life; he was no longer a baby; the nursery was now a schoolroom; he
stayed up an hour later at night; he was to be allowed twopence a week
pocket-money; his whole social status had risen. He began to read for
pleasure, and discovered that it was easier than he had expected, so
that he passed quite quickly through “Lottie's Visit to Grandmama” into
“Stumps” and out again in “Jackanapes.” He heard some elder say that the
road to a large fortune lay through “Sums,” and, although this seemed to
him an extremely mysterious statement, he determined to give the theory
a chance. In fact, he sat down the first day at the schoolroom table,
Mary and Helen on each side of him, and Miss Jones facing them, with
fine resolves and high ambitions. Before him lay a pure white page, and
at the head of this the noble words in a running hand: “Slow and steady
wins the race.” He grasped his pencil, and Miss Jones, eager to lose no
time in asserting her authority, cried: “But that's not the way to hold
your pencil, Jeremy, your thumb so, your finger so.” He scowled and
found that lifting his thumb over the pencil was as difficult as lifting
Hamlet over a gate. He made a bold attempt, but the pencil refused to
move.

“Can't hold it that way,” he said.

“You must never say 'can't,' Jeremy,” remarked Miss Jones. “There isn't
such a word.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mary eagerly, “there is; I've seen it in books.”

“You musn't contradict, Mary,” said Miss Jones. “I only meant that you
must behave as though there isn't, because nothing is impossible to one
who truly tries.”

“My pencil waggles this way,” said Jeremy politely. “I think I'll hold
it the old way, please.”

“There's only one way of doing anything,” said Miss Jones, “and that's
the right way.”

“This is the right way for me,” said Jeremy.

“If I say it's not the right way--”

“But it waggles,” cried Jeremy.

The discussion was interrupted by a cry from Helen.

“Oh, do look, Miss Jones, Hamlet's got your spectacle-case. He thinks
it's a mouse.”

There followed general confusion. Miss Jones jumped up, and, with little
cries of distress, pursued Hamlet, who hastened into his favourite
corner and began to worry the spectacle-case, with one eye on Miss Jones
and one on his spoils.

Jeremy hurried up crying: “Put it down, Hamlet, naughty dog, naughty
dog,” and Mary and Helen laughed with frantic delight.

At last Miss Jones, her face red and her hair in disorder, rescued her
property and returned to the table, Hamlet meanwhile wagging his tail,
panting and watching for a further game.

“I can't possibly,” said Miss Jones, “allow that dog in here during
lesson hours. It's impossible.”

“Oh, but Miss Jones--” began Jeremy.

“Not one word,” said she, “let us have no more of this. Lead him from
the room, Jeremy!”

“But, Miss Jones, he must be here. He's learning too. In a day or two
he'll be as good as anything, really he will. He's so intelligent. He
really thought it was his to play with, and he did give it up, didn't
he, as soon as I said--”

“Enough,” said Miss Jones, “I will listen to no more. I say he is not to
remain--”

“But if I promise--” said Jeremy.

Then Miss Jones made a bad mistake. Wearied of the argument, wishing to
continue the lesson, and hoping perhaps to please her tormentors, she
said meekly:

“Well, if he really is good, perhaps--”

From that instant her doom was sealed. The children exchanged a glance
of realisation. Jeremy smiled. The lesson was continued. What possessed
Jeremy now? What possesses any child, naturally perhaps, of a kindly and
even sentimental nature at the sight of something helpless and in its
power? Is there any cruelty in after life like the cruelty of a small
boy, and is there anything more powerful, more unreasoning, and more
malicious than the calculating tortures that small children devise for
those weaker than themselves? Jeremy was possessed with a new power.

It was something almost abstract in its manifestations; it was something
indecent, sinister, secret, foreign to his whole nature felt by him now
for the first time, unanalysed, of course, but belonging, had he known
it, to that world of which afterwards he was often to catch glimpses,
that world of shining white faces in dark streets, of muffled cries
from shuttered windows, of muttered exclamations, half caught, half
understood. He was never again to be quite free from the neighbourhood
of that half-world; he would never be quite sure of his dominance of it
until he died.

He had never felt anything like this power before. With the Jampot
his relations had been quite simple; he had been rebellious, naughty,
disobedient, and had been punished, and there was an end. Now there was
a game like tracking Red Indians in the prairie or tigers in the jungle.

He watched Miss Jones and discovered many things about her. He
discovered that when she made mistakes in the things that she taught
them she was afraid to confess to her mistakes, and so made them worse
and worse. He discovered that she was very nervous, and that a sudden
noise made her jump and turn white and put her hand to her heart. He
discovered that she would punish him and then try to please him by
saying he need not finish his punishment. He discovered that she would
lose things, like her spectacles, her handkerchief, or her purse,
and then be afraid to confess that she had lost them and endeavour to
proceed without them. He discovered that she hated to hit him on the
hand with a ruler (he scarcely felt the strokes). He discovered that
when his mother or father was in the room she was terrified lest he
should misbehave.

He discovered that she was despised by the servants, who quite openly
insulted her.

All these things fed his sense of power. He did not consider her a human
being at all; she was simply something upon which he could exercise his
ingenuity and cleverness. Mary followed him in whatever he did; Helen
pretended to be superior, but was not. Yes, Miss Jones was in the hands
of her tormentors, and there was no escape for her.

Surely it must have been some outside power that drove Jeremy on. The
children called it “teasing Miss Jones,” and the aboriginal savagery in
their behaviour was as unconscious as their daily speech or fashion of
eating their food--some instinct inherited, perhaps, from the days when
the gentleman with the biggest muscles extracted for his daily amusement
the teeth and nails of his less happily muscular friends.

There were many games to be played with Miss Jones. She always began
her morning with a fine show of authority, accumulated, perhaps, during
hours of Spartan resolution whilst the rest of the household slept.
“To-morrow I'll see that they do what I tell them--”

“Now, children,” she would say, “I'm determined to stand no nonsense
this morning. Get out your copy books.” Five minutes later would begin:
“Oh, Miss Jones, I can't write with this pencil. May I find a better
one?” Granted permission, Mary's head and large spectacles would
disappear inside the schoolroom cupboard. Soon Jeremy would say very
politely: “Miss Jones, I think I know where it is. May I help her
to find it?” Then Jeremy's head would disappear. There would follow
giggles, whispers, again giggles; then from the cupboard a book tumbles,
then another, then another. Then Miss Jones would say: “Now, Jeremy,
come back to the table. You've had quite enough time--” interrupted by a
perfect avalanche of books. Mary crying:

“Oh, Jeremy!” Jeremy crying: “I didn't; it was you!” Miss Jones: “Now,
children--”

Then Jeremy, very politely:

“Please, Miss Jones, may I help Mary to pick the books up? There are
rather a lot.” Then, both on their knees, more whispers and giggles.
Miss Jones, her voice trembling: “Children, I really insist--” And
more books dropped, and more whispers and more protests, and so on ad
infinitum. A beautiful game to be played all the morning.

Or there was the game of Not Hearing. Miss Jones would say: “And twice
two are four.” Mary would repeat loudly: “And twice two is five--”

“Four, Mary.”

“Oh, I thought you said five.”

And then a second later Jeremy would ask:

“Did you say four or five, Miss Jones?”

“I told Mary I said four--”

“Oh, I've written five--and now it's all wrong. Didn't you write five,
Mary?”

“Yes, I've written five. You did say four, didn't you, Miss Jones?”

“Yes--yes. And three makes--”

“What did you say made five?” asked Jeremy.

“I didn't say five. I said four. Twice two.”

“Is that as well as 'add three,' Miss Jones? I've got twice two, and
then add three, and then twice two--”

“No, no. I was only telling Jeremy--”

“Please, Miss Jones, would you mind beginning again--”

This is a very unpleasant game for a lady with neuralgia.

Or there is the game of Making a Noise. At this game, without any
earlier training or practice, Jeremy was a perfect master. The three
children would be sitting there very, very quiet, learning the first
verse of “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright--” A very gentle creaking sound
would break the stillness--a creaking sound that can be made, if you are
clever, by rubbing a boot against a boot. It would not come regularly,
but once, twice, thrice, a pause, and then once, twice and another
pause.

“Who's making a noise?”

Dead silence. A very long pause, and then it would begin again.

“That noise must cease, I say. Jeremy, what are you doing?”

He would lift to her then eyes full of meekness and love.

“Nothing, Miss Jones.”

Soon it would begin again. Miss Jones would be silent this time, and
then Mary would speak.

“Please, would you ask Jeremy not to rub his boots together? I can't
learn my verse--”

“I didn't know I was,” says Jeremy.

Then it would begin again. Jeremy would say:

“Please, may I take my boots off?”

“Take your boots off? Why?”

“They will rub together, and I can't stop them, because I don't know
when I do it, and it is hard for Mary--”

“Of course not! I never heard of such a thing! Next time you do it you
must stand on your chair.”

Soon Jeremy is standing on his chair. Soon his poetry book drops with
a terrible crash to the ground, and five million pins stab Miss Jones's
heart. With white face and trembling hands, she says:

“Go and stand in the corner, Jeremy! I shall have to speak to your
mother!”

He goes, grinning at Mary, and stands there knowing that his victim is
watching the door in an agony lest Mrs. Cole should suddenly come in
and inquire what Jeremy had done, and that so the whole story of his
insubordination be revealed and Miss Jones lose her situation for
incapacity.

How did he discover this final weakness of Miss Jones? No one told him;
but he knew, and, as the days passed, rejoiced in his power and his
might and his glory.

Then came the climax. The children were not perfectly sure whether,
after all, Miss Jones might not tell their mother. They did not wish
this to happen, and so long as this calamity was possible they were not
complete masters of the poor lady. Then came a morning when they had
been extremely naughty, when every game had been played and every
triumph scored. Miss Jones, almost in tears, had threatened four times
that the Powers Above should be informed. Suddenly Mrs. Cole entered.

“Well, Miss Jones, how have the children been this morning? If they've
been good I have a little treat to propose.”

The children waited, their eyes upon their governess. Her eyes stared
back upon her tormentors. Her hands worked together. She struggled. Why
not call in Mrs. Cole's authority to her aid? No; she knew what it would
mean--“I'm very sorry, Miss Jones, but I think a younger governess,
perhaps--”

Her throat moved.

“They've been very good this morning, Mrs. Cole.”

The eyes of Mary and of Jeremy were alight with triumph.

They had won their final victory.




III


I know what Miss Jones suffered during those weeks. She was not an old
lady of very great power of resistance, and it must have positively
terrified her that these small children should so vindictively hate
her. She could not have seen it as anything but hatred, being entirely
ignorant of children and the strange forces to whose power they are
subject, and she must have shivered in her bedroom at the dreariness
and terror of the prospect before her. Many, many times she must have
resolved not to be beaten, and many, many times she must have admitted
herself beaten as badly as any one can be.

Her life with the people downstairs was not intimate enough, nor were
those people themselves perceptive enough for any realisation of what
was occurring to penetrate.

“I hope you're happy with the children, Miss Jones,” once or twice said
Mrs. Cole.

“Very, thank you,” said Miss Jones.

“They're good children, I think, although parents are always prejudiced,
of course. Jeremy is a little difficult perhaps. It's so hard to tell
what he's really thinking. You find him a quiet, reserved little boy?”

“Very,” said Miss Jones.

“In a little while, when you know him better, he will come out. Only you
have to let him take his time. He doesn't like to be forced--”

“No,” said Miss Jones.

Meanwhile, that morning descent into the schoolroom was real hell
for her. She had to summon up her courage, walking about her bedroom,
pressing her hands together, evoking the memory of her magnificent
iron-souled brother, who would, she knew, despise such tremors. If only
she could have discovered some remedy! But sentiment, attempted tyranny,
anger, contempt, at all these things they laughed. She could not touch
them anywhere. And she saw Jeremy as a real child of Evil in the very
baldest sense. She could not imagine how anyone so young could be
so cruel, so heartless, so maliciously clever in his elaborate
machinations. She regarded him with real horror, and on the occasions
when she found him acting kindly towards his sisters or a servant, or
when she watched him discoursing solemnly to Hamlet, she was helplessly
puzzled, and decided that these better manifestations were simply masks
to hide his devilish young heart. She perceived meanwhile the inevitable
crisis slowly approaching, when she would be compelled to invite Mrs.
Cole's support. That would mean her dismissal and a hopeless future.
There was no one to whom she might turn. She had not a relation, not a
friend--too late to make friends now.

She could see nothing in front of her at all.

The crisis did come, but not as she expected it.

There arrived a morning when the dark mist outside and badly made
porridge inside tempted the children to their very worst. Miss Jones
had had a wakeful night struggling with neuralgia and her own hesitating
spirit. The children had lost even their customary half-humourous,
half-contemptuous reserve. They let themselves appear for what they
were--infant savages discontented with food, weather and education.

I will not detail the incidents of that morning. The episodes that were
on other mornings games were today tortures. There was the Torture of
Losing Things, the Torture of Not Hearing, the Torture of Many Noises,
the Torture of Sudden Alarm, the Torture of Outright Defiance, the
Torture of Expressed Contempt. When twelve struck and the children were
free, Miss Jones was not far from a nervous panic that can be called,
without any exaggeration, incipient madness. The neuralgia tore at her
brain, her own self-contempt tore at her heart, her baffled impotence
bewildered and blinded her. She did not leave the schoolroom with the
children, but went to the broad window-sill and sat there looking out
into the dreary prospect. Then, suddenly for no reason except general
weakness and physical and spiritual collapse she began to cry.

Jeremy was considered to have a cold, and was, therefore, not permitted
to accompany his mother and sisters on an exciting shopping expedition,
which would certainly lead as far as old Poole's, the bookseller, and
might even extend to Martins', the pastrycook, who made lemon biscuits
next door to the Cathedral. He was, therefore, in a very bad temper
indeed when he returned sulkily to the schoolroom. He stood for a moment
there unaware that there was anybody in the room, hesitating as to
whether he should continue “A Flat Iron for a Farthing” or hunt up
Hamlet. Suddenly he heard the sound of sobbing. He turned and saw Miss
Jones.

He would have fled had flight been in any way possible, but she had
looked up and seen him, and her sudden arrested sniff held them both
there as though by some third invisible power. He saw that she was
crying; he saw her red nose, mottled cheeks, untidy hair. It was the
most awful moment of his young life. He had never seen a grown-up person
cry before; he had no idea that they ever did cry. He had, indeed, never
realised that grown-up persons had any active histories at all, any
histories in the sense in which he and Mary had them. They were all a
background, simply a background that blew backwards and forwards like
tapestry according to one's need of them. His torture of Miss Jones had
been founded on no sort of realisation of her as a human being; she
had been a silly old woman, of course, but just as the battered
weather-beaten Aunt Sally in the garden was a silly old woman.

Her crying horrified, terrified, and disgusted him. It was all so
dreary, the horrible weather outside, the beginning of a cold in his
head, the schoolroom fire almost out, everyone's bad temper, including
his own, and this sudden horrible jumping-to-life of a grown-up human
being. She, meanwhile, was too deeply involved now in the waters of her
affliction to care very deeply who saw her or what anyone said to her.
She did feel dimly that she ought not to be crying in front of a small
boy of eight years old, and that it would be better to hide herself in
her bedroom, but she did not mind--she COULD not mind--her neuralgia was
too bad.

“It's the neuralgia in my head,” she said in a muffled confused voice.
That he could understand. He also had pains in his head. He drew closer
to her, flinging a longing backward look at the door. She went on in
convulsed tones:

“It's the pain--awake all night, and the lessons. I can't make them
attend; they learn nothing. They're not afraid of me--they hate me. I've
never really known children before--”

He did not know what to say. Had it been Mary or Helen the formula would
have been simple. He moved his legs restlessly one against the other.

Miss Jones went on:

“And now, of course, I must go. It's quite impossible for me to stay
when I manage so badly--” She looked up and suddenly realised that it
was truly Jeremy. “You're only a little boy, but you know very well that
I can't manage you. And then where am I to go to? No one will take me
after I've been such a failure.”

The colour stole into his cheeks. He was immensely proud. No grown-up
person had ever before spoken to him as though he was himself a grown-up
person--always laughing at him like Uncle Samuel, or talking down to
him like Aunt Amy, or despising him like Mr. Jellybrand. But Miss Jones
appealed to him simply as one grown-up to another. Unfortunately he did
not in the least know what to say. The only thing he could think of at
the moment was: “You can have my handkerchief, if you like. It's pretty
clean--”

But she went on: “If my brother had been alive he would have advised
me. He was a splendid man. He rowed in his college boat when he was
at Cambridge, but that, of course, was forty years ago. He could keep
children in order. I thought it would be so easy. Perhaps if my health
had been better it wouldn't have been so hard.”

“Do your pains come often?” asked Jeremy.

“Yes. They're very bad.”

“I have them, too,” said Jeremy. “It's generally, I expect, because I
eat too much--at least, the Jampot used to say so. They're in my head
sometimes, too. And then I'm really sick. Do you feel sick?”

Miss Jones began to pull herself together. She wiped her eyes and patted
her hair.

“It's my neuralgia,” she said again. “It's from my eyes partly, I
expect.”

“It's better to be sick,” continued Jeremy, “if you can be--”

She flung him then a desperate look, as though she were really an animal
at bay.

“You see, I can't go away,” she said. “I've nowhere to go to. I've no
friends, nor relations, and no one will take me for their children, if
Mrs. Cole says I can't keep order.”

“Then I suppose you'd go to the workhouse,” continued Jeremy, pursuing
her case with excited interest. “That's what the Jampot always used
to say, that one day she'd end in the workhouse; and that's a horrible
place, SHE said, where there was nothing but porridge to eat, and
sometimes they took all your clothes off and scrubbed your back with
that hard yellow soap they wash Hamlet with.”

His eyes grew wide with the horrible picture.

“Oh, Miss Jones, you mustn't go there!”

“Would you mind,” she said, “just getting me some water from the jug over
there? There's a glass there.”

Still proud of the level to which he had been raised, but puzzled beyond
any words as to this new realisation of Miss Jones, he fetched her the
water, then, standing quite close to her, he said:

“You must stay with us, always.”

She looked up at him, and they exchanged a glance.

With that glance Miss Jones learnt more about children than she had ever
learnt before--more, indeed, than most people learn in all their mortal
lives.

“I can't stay,” she said, and she even smiled a little, “if you're
always naughty.”

“We won't be naughty any more.” He sighed. “It was great fun, of course,
but we won't do it any more. We never knew you minded.”

“Never knew I minded?”

“At least, we never thought about you at all. Helen did sometimes. She
said you had a headache when you were very yellow in the morning, but I
said it was only because you were old. But we'll be good now. I'll tell
them too--”

Then he added: “But you won't go away now even if we're not always good?
We won't always be, I suppose; and I'm going to school in September,
and it will be better then, I expect. I'm too old, really, to learn with
girls now.”

She wanted terribly to kiss him, and, had she done so, the whole good
work of the last quarter of an hour would have been undone. He was aware
of her temptation; he felt it in the air. She saw the warning in his
eyes. The moment passed.

“You won't go away, will you?” he said again.

“Not if you're good,” she said.




IV


Half an hour later, when Mary and Helen returned from their walk, they
were addressed by Jeremy.

“She was crying because we'd been so naughty, and she had pains in her
head, and her brother was dead. Her brother was very strong, and he
used to row in a boat forty years ago. She told me all about it, just as
though I'd been Aunt Amy or Mother. And she says that if we go on being
naughty she'll go away, and no one else will have her, because they'll
hear about our having been naughty. And I told her about the workhouse
and the porridge and the yellow soap that the Jampot told us of, and it
would be awful if she went there because of us, wouldn't it?”

“Awful,” said Mary.

But Helen said: “She wouldn't go there. She'd take a little house,
like Miss Dobell, and have tea-parties on Thursdays--somewhere near the
Cathedral.”

“No, she wouldn't!” said Jeremy excitedly. “How could she take a little
house if she hadn't any money? She told me she hadn't, and no friends,
nor nobody, and she cried like anything--” He paused for breath, then
concluded: “So we've got to be good now, and learn sums, and not make
her jump. Really and truly, we must.”

“I always thought you were very silly to make so much noise,” said Helen
in a superior fashion. “You and Mary--babies!”

“We're not babies,” shouted Jeremy.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, we're not.”

Miss Jones was no longer the subject of the conversation.

That same day it happened that rumours were brought to Mrs. Cole through
Rose, the housemaid, or some other medium for the first time, of Miss
Jones's incapacity.

That evening Jeremy was spending his last half-hour before bedtime in
his mother's room happily in a corner with his toy village. He suddenly
heard his mother say to Aunt Amy:

“I'm afraid Miss Jones won't do. I thought she was managing the
children, but now I hear that she can't keep order at all. I'm
sorry--it's so difficult to get anyone.”

Jeremy sprang up from the floor, startling the ladies, who had forgotten
that he was there.

“She's all right,” he cried. “Really she is, Mother. We're going to be
as good as anything, really we are. You won't send her away, will you?”

“My dear Jeremy,” his mother said, “I'd forgotten you were there. Rose
says you don't do anything Miss Jones tells you.”

“Rose is silly,” he answered. “She doesn't know anything about it. But
you will keep her, won't you, Mother?”

“I don't know--if she can't manage you--”

“But she can manage us. We'll be good as anything, I promise. You will
keep her, won't you, Mother?”

“Really, Jeremy,” said Aunt Amy, “to bother your mother so! And it's
nearly time you went to bed.”

He brushed her aside. “You will keep her, Mother, won't you?”

“It depends, dear,” said Mrs. Cole, laughing. “You see--”

“No--we'll be bad with everyone else,” he cried. “We will,
really--everyone else. And we'll be good with Miss Jones.”

“Well, so long as you're good, dear,” she said. “I'd no idea you liked
her so much.”

“Oh, she's all right,” he said. “But it isn't that--” Then he stopped;
he couldn't explain--especially with that idiot Aunt Amy there, who'd
only laugh at him, or kiss him, or something else horrible.

Afterwards, as he went slowly up to bed, he stopped for a moment in the
dark passage thinking. The whole house was silent about him, only the
clocks whispering.

What a tiresome bother Aunt Amy was! How he wished that she were dead!
And what a bore it would be being good now with Miss Jones. At the same
time, the renewed consciousness of her personal drama most strangely
moved him--her brother who rowed, her neuralgia, her lack of relations.
Perhaps Aunt Amy also had an exciting history! Perhaps she also cried!

The world seemed to be suddenly filled with pressing, thronging figures,
all with businesses of their own.

It was very odd.

He pushed back the schoolroom door and blinked at the sudden light.




CHAPTER V. THE SEA-CAPTAIN


I


Very few matter-of-fact citizens of the present-day world will
understand the part that the sea used to play in our young lives thirty
years ago in Polchester.

It is very easy to look at the map and say that the sea is a
considerable distance from Polchester, and that even if you stood on the
highest ridge of the highest cornfield above the town you would not be
able to catch the faintest glimpse of it. That may be true, although I
myself can never be completely assured, possessing so vividly as I do a
memory of a day when I stood with my nurse at the edge of Merazion Woods
and, gazing out to the horizon, saw a fleet of ships full-sail upon the
bluest of seas, and would not be persuaded that it was merely wrack of
clouds. That may be or no; the fact remains that Polchester sniffed
the sea from afar, was caught with sea breezes and bathed in reflected
sea-lights; again and again of an evening the Cathedral sailed on dust
and shadow towards the horizon, a great white ghost of a galleon, and
the young citizens of the town with wondering eyes, watched it go. But
there were more positive influences than mere cloud and light. We had,
in the lower part of our town, sailors, quite a number of them. There
were the old white-bearded ones who would sit upon tubs and tell
smuggling tales; these haunted the River Pol, fished in it, ferried
people across it, and let out boats for hire. There were younger sailors
who, tired of the still life of their little villages and dreading the
real hard work of a life at sea, lurched and slouched by the Pol's river
bed, fishing a little, sleeping, eating and drinking a great deal.

And there were the true sailors, passing through perhaps on their way
to Drymouth to join their ships, staying in the town for a day or two
to visit their relations, or simply stopping for an hour or so to gaze
open-mouthed at the Cathedral and the market-place and the Canons and
the old women. These men had sometimes gold rings in their ears, and
their faces were often coloured a dark rich brown, and they carried
bundles across their backs all in the traditional style.

Then there were influences more subtle than either clouds or men. There
were the influences of the places that we had ourselves seen in our
summer holidays--Rafiel and St. Lowe, Marion Bay or Borhaze--and, on
the other coast, Newbock with its vast stretch of yellow sand, St. Borse
with its wild seas and giant Borse Head, or St. Nails-in-Cove with its
coloured rocks and sparkling shells. Every child had his own place; my
place was, like Jeremy's, Rafiel, and a better, more beautiful place, in
the whole world you will not find. And each place has its own legend:
at Rafiel the Gold lured Pirates, and the Turnip-Field; at Polwint the
Giant Excise Man; at Borhaze the Smugglers of Trezent Rock; at St. Borse
the wreck of “The Golden Galleon” in the year 1563, with its wonderful
treasure; and at St. Maitsin Cove the famous Witch of St. Maitsin Church
Town who turned men's bones into water and filled St. Maitsin Church
with snakes. Back from one summer holiday, treasuring these stories
together with our collections of shells and seaweed and dried flowers,
we came, and so the tales settled in Polchester streets and crept into
the heart of the Polchester cobbles and haunted the Polchester corners
by the fire, and even invaded with their romantic, peering, mischievous
faces the solemn aisles of the Cathedral itself.

The sea was at the heart of all of them, and whenever a sea-breeze
blew down the street carrying with it wisps of straw from the field, or
dandelion seeds, or smell of sea-pinks, we children lifted our noses
and sniffed and sniffed and saw the waves curl in across the shore,
or breakers burst upon the rock, and whispered to one another of the
Smugglers of Trezent or the Gold-laced Pirates of Rafiel.

But I think that none of us adored the sea as Jeremy did. From that
first moment when, as a small baby, he had been held up in Rafiel Cove
to see the tops of the waves catch the morning light as they rolled over
to shore, he had adored it. He had never felt any fear of it; he had
been able to swim since he could remember, and he simply lived for those
days at the end of July when they would all, in a frantic hurry and
confusion, take the train for Rafiel and arrive at Cow Farm in the
evening, with the roar of the sea coming across the quiet fields to
mingle with the lowing of the cows and the bleating of the sheep. He had
in his bedroom a wonderful collection of dusty and sticky sea-shells,
and these he would turn over and over, letting them run through his
fingers as a miner counts his gold.

Let him catch the faintest glimpse of a shadow of a sailor in the street
and he was after it, and he had once, when he was only four or five,
been caught by the terrified Jampot, only just in time, walking away
confidently down the market-place, his hand in the huge grasp of a
villainous looking mariner. He was exceedingly happy in his home, but he
did often wonder whether he would not run away to sea; of course, he
was going to be a sailor, but it seemed so long to wait until he was
thirteen or fourteen, and there was the sea all the time rolling in and
out and inviting him to come.

Mrs. Cole warned Miss Jones of this taste of Jeremy's: “Never let him
speak to a sailor, Miss Jones. There are some horrible men in the town,
and Jeremy simply is not to be trusted when sailors are concerned.”

Miss Jones, however, could not be always on her guard, and Fate is
stronger than any governess...

Early in February there came one of those hints of spring that in
Glebeshire more than in any other place in the world thrill and stir the
heart. Generally they give very little in actual reward and are followed
by weeks of hail and sleet and wind, but for that reason alone their
burning promise is beyond all other promises beguiling. Jeremy got up
one morning to feel that somewhere behind the thick wet mists of the
early hours there was a blazing sun. After breakfast, opening the window
and leaning out, he could see the leaves of the garden still shining
with their early glitter and the earth channelled into fissures and
breaks, dark and hard under the silver-threaded frost; beneath the rind
of the soil he could feel the pushing, heaving life struggling to answer
the call of the sun above it. Far down the road towards the Orchards a
dim veil of gold was spreading behind the walls of mist; the sparrows
on the almond tree near his window chattered like the girls of the High
School, and blue shadows stole into the dim grey sky, just as light
breaks upon an early morning sea; the air was warm behind the outer wall
of the frosty morning, and the faint gold of the first crocus beneath
the garden wall near the pantry door, where always the first crocuses
came, caught his eye. Even as he watched the sun burst the mist, the
trees changed from dim grey to sharp black, the blue flooded the sky,
and the Cathedral beyond the trees shone like a house of crystal.

All this meant spring, and spring meant hunting for snowdrops in the
Meads. Jeremy informed Miss Jones, and Miss Jones was, of course,
agreeable. They would walk that way after luncheon.

The Meads fall in a broad green slope from the old Cathedral battlement
down to the River Pol. Their long stretches of meadow are scattered
with trees, some of the oldest oaks in Glebeshire, and they are finally
bounded by the winding path of the Rope Walk that skirts the river bank.
Along the Rope Walk in March and April the daffodils first, and the
primroses afterwards, are so thick that, from the Cathedral walls, the
Rope Walk looks as though it wandered between pools and lakes of gold.
In the Orchards on the hill also they run like rivers.

Upon this afternoon there were only the trees, faintly pink, along the
river and the wide unbroken carpet of green. Miss Jones walked up and
down the Rope Walk, whilst Mary told her an endless and exceedingly
confused story that had begun more than a week ago and had reached by
now such a state of “To be continued in our next” that Miss Jones had
only the vaguest idea of what it was all about. Her mind therefore
wandered, as indeed, did always the minds of Mary's audiences, and Mary
never noticed but stared with the rapt gaze of the creator through her
enormous glasses, out into an enchanted world of golden princesses,
white elephants and ropes and ropes of rubies. Miss Jones meanwhile
thought of her young days, her illnesses and a certain hat that she
had seen in Thornley's windows in the High Street. Jeremy, attended by
Hamlet, hunted amongst the trees for snowdrops.

Hamlet had been worried ever since he could remember by a theory about
rabbits. He had been told, of course, about rabbits by his parents, and
it had even been suggested to him that he would be a mighty hunter of
the same when he grew to a certain age. He had now reached that age, but
never a rabbit as yet had he encountered. He might even have concluded
that the whole Rabbit story was a myth and a legend were it not that
certain scents and odours were for ever tantalising his nose that could,
his instinct told him, mean Rabbit and only Rabbit. These scents met him
at the most tantalising times, pulling him this way and that, exciting
the wildest hopes in him, afterwards condemned to sterility; as ghosts
haunt the convinced and trusting spiritualist, so did rabbits haunt
Hamlet. He dreamt of Rabbits at night, he tasted Rabbits in his food, he
saw them scale the air and swim the stream--now, he was close on their
trail, now he had them round that tree, up that hill, down that hole...
sitting tranquilly in front of the schoolroom fire he would scent them;
always they eluded him, laughed at him, mocked him with their stumpy
tails. They were rapidly becoming the obsession of his nights and days.

Upon this afternoon the air was full of Rabbit. The Meads seemed to
breathe Rabbit. He left his master, rushed hither and thither, barked
and whined, scratched the soil, ran round the trees, lay cautiously
motionless waiting for his foes, and now and then sat and laughed
at himself for a ludicrous rabbit-bemused idiot. He had a delightful
afternoon...

Jeremy then was left entirely to himself and wandered about, looking for
snowdrops under the trees, talking to himself, lost in a chain of ideas
that included food and the sea and catapults and a sore finger and
what school would be like and whether he could knock down the Dean's
youngest, Ernest, whom he hated without knowing why.

He was lost in these thoughts, and had indeed wandered almost into the
little wood that lies at the foot of the Orchards, when he heard a deep
rich voice say:

“I suppose you 'aven't such a thing as a match upon you anywhere, young
gentleman?”

He liked to be asked for a match, a manly thing to be supposed to
possess, but, of course, he hadn't one, owing to the stupidity of
elderly relations, so he looked up and said politely: “No, I'm afraid
I haven't.” Then how his heart whacked beneath his waistcoat! There,
standing in front of him, was the very figure of his dreams! Looking
down upon Jeremy was a gentleman of middle-age whom experienced men of
the world would have most certainly described as “seedy.”

Jeremy did not see his “seediness.” He saw first his face, which was of
a deep brown copper colour, turning here and there to a handsome purple;
ill-shaved, perhaps, but with a fine round nose and a large smiling
mouth. He saw black curling hair and a yachting cap, faded this last and
the white of it a dirty grey but set on jauntily at a magnificent angle.
He saw a suit of dark navy blue, this again faded, spotted too with many
stains, ragged at the trouser-ends and even torn in one place above the
elbow, fitting also so closely to the figure that it must have been at
bursting point. He saw round the neck a dark navy handkerchief, and down
the front of the coat brass buttons that shook and trembled as their
owner's chest heaved.

And what a chest! Jeremy had never conceived that any human being could
be so thick and so broad. The back, spreading to the farthest limits of
the shiny seams of the coat, was like a wall. The thighs were pillows,
the arms bolsters and yet not fat, mind you, simply muscle, all of
it. One could see in a minute that it was all muscle, the chest thrust
forward, the legs spread wide, the bull-neck bursting the handkerchief,
everything that Jeremy himself most wished to be. A sailor, a monument
of strength, with the scent of his “shag” strong enough to smell a mile
away, and--yes, most marvellous of all, gold rings in his ears! His
chest would be tatooed probably, and perhaps his legs also!

There, on the back of his hand, was a blue anchor.... Jeremy looked
up and trembled lest the vision should fade, then flung a hurried look
around him to see whether Miss Jones were near. No one was about. He was
alone with the desire of his life.

“I'm so so sorry I haven't a match,” he said. “I'm not allowed to have
them, you know.”

“No, I suppose not,” said the vision. “Just my blamed luck. There I am
with 'undreds of pounds lying around my room at 'ome careless as you
please, and then held up for a bloomin' match. What's gold to a man like
me? But a match... there you are... that's life.”

He looked at Jeremy with great interest; he took in, as Jeremy realised,
every detail of his personal appearance.

“I like boys,” he said. “'Ad two myself--'ealthy little nippers they
was. Both dead-'ere to-day and gone to-morrer, as you might say. Got
your nurse 'anging around anywhere?”

“Nurse?” said Jeremy indignantly. “I don't have a nurse. I'm much too
old! There is a governess, but she's over there talking to Mary. She's
my sister--but they won't bother yet--not till the Cathedral bell
begins.”

“No intention of 'urting your feelings, young fellow my lad. Didn't
think you'd want a nurse of course--big chap like you. Thought you might
'ave a baby brother or such. No offence--I suppose you 'aven't begun to
smoke yet. Can't offer you some tobacco.”

Jeremy coloured. The man was laughing at him.

“I'm eight if you want to know,” he said, “and I'm going to school in
September.”

“School!” said the mariner, sniffing contemptuously. “I don't think much
of school if you ask me. Now I never went to school, and I can't see
that I'm much the worse for not 'aving been there. Contrariwise--I've
seen many a fine promising lad spoiled by too much schoolin'. Be a man
of the world, I say; that's the direction you want to sail in.”

“Did you really never go to school?” asked Jeremy.

“Not I!” relied the sailor. “Flung out at the age of six, I was, turned
into a boat sailing to the West Indies and left to shift for myself--and
'ere I am to-day a Captain of as fine a craft as you're ever likely to
see, with gold in 'er lockers and peacocks in the 'old--all in a manner
of speaking, you know.”

Jeremy's eyes glittered; his face was flushed a brilliant red. Hamlet
had returned from his rabbit hunting and sat with his tongue out and a
wild adventurous eye glittering up at his master from behind his hair,
yet he was not noticed.

“You were very lucky,” he said devoutly, then he went on hurriedly:
“Would you mind--you see, Miss Jones may come at any moment--would you
mind--” he choked.

“Would I mind what?” asked the Captain.

“Would you mind telling me? Are you tatooed on your body, snakes and
ships and things, like a gardener once we had? He had a sea-serpent all
down his back. He showed me one day.”

The Captain smiled proudly.

“Tatooed! Talk of tatooing! I'll show yer--and it isn't everybody I'd do
it for neither. But I've taken a fancy to you, like my own young nipper
what died.”

With an air of vast ceremony, as though he were throwing open the door
to all the universe, he slowly unwound from about his neck the dark blue
handkerchief, unbuttoned his coat, then a grimy shirt and displayed a
wall of deep brown chest. This fine expanse had no hair upon it, but
was illuminated with a superb picture of a ship in full sail against
a setting sun, all worked in the most handsome of blue tatoo. Jeremy
gasped. He had never dreamed that such things could be. He ventured to
touch the ship with his finger, and he could feel the Captain's manly
heart thumping like a muffled hammer beneath the skin.

“There's Queen Victoria on my right thigh and Nelson on my left, and the
battle of Trafalgar on the middle of my back. P'raps I'll show 'em you
one day. It wouldn't be decent exactly 'ere--too public. But one day you
come to my little place and I'll show 'em you.”

“Will you really?” said Jeremy. “Didn't it hurt terribly?”

“Hurt!” said the Captain. “I should just think it did. I 'ad to put
cotton wool behind my teeth to prevent myself from screaming. But that's
nothing. What do you say to being tortured by the Caribbees natives
every day after breakfast for three 'ole months. A tooth out a day--”

“But your teeth are all there,” said Jeremy.

“False,” said the Captain. “Every one of 'em. And the things they'll do
to your toenails--it 'ud make your 'air creep on your 'ead to listen to
the things I could tell you--”

“Oh, it's awful!” said Jeremy. “And where is your ship now?”

“Ah, my ship!” the Captain replied, winking in the most mysterious
fashion; “it would be telling to say where that is. I can trust you,
I know; I'm a great judge o' character, I am, but not even with my
own mother, gone to glory now twenty years and as holy a soul as ever
breathed, I wouldn't trust even 'er with the secret.”

“Why is it a secret?” asked Jeremy breathlessly.

“Treasure,” said the Captain, dropping his voice.

“Treasure, nothing less nor more. Between you and me there's enough gold
on that there ship to satisfy the Prime Minister 'imself, to say nothing
of the jewels--rubies, pearls, diamonds. My word, if you could see them
diamonds. I'm looking about me now for an extra man or two, and then I'm
off again--silent come, silent go's my motto--”

“I suppose you don't happen to want a cabin-boy?” gasped Jeremy, his
voice choked in his throat.

“Well, now, that's a funny thing,” said the Captain. “It's one of the
very things. But I'm afraid you're a bit young. Yet I don't know. We
might--”

He broke off, suddenly lifted his finger to his lip, whispered:

“Keep your eyes open. I'll be round again,” and had vanished.

Directly after Jeremy heard Miss Jones's unwelcome voice: “Why, Jeremy,
we couldn't find you anywhere. It's turning cold--tea-time--”
 With a thump and a thud and a bang he fell back into the homely world.




III


Jeremy was a perfectly normal little boy, and I defy anyone to
have discovered in him at this stage in his progress, those strange
morbidities and irregular instincts that were to be found in such
unhappy human beings as Dostoieffsky's young hero in “Podrostok,” or the
unpleasant son and heir of Jude and Sue. Nevertheless, eight years
old is not too early for stranger impulses and wilder dreams than most
parents ever conceive of, and the fortnight that followed Jeremy's
meeting with the Sea-Captain was as peculiar and fantastic a fortnight
as he was ever, in all his later life, to know.

For he was haunted--really haunted in the good old solid practical
meaning of the term--haunted with the haunting that pursued Sintram
and many another famous hero. And he was haunted not only by the
Sea-Captain, but by a thousand things that attended in that hero's
company. He was haunted by a picture--whence it had come to him he did
not know--of a dead-white high road, dropping over the hill into shadow,
the light fading around it, black, heavy hedges on every side of it.
From below the hill came the pounding of the sea, exactly as he had
heard it so many many times on the hill above Rafiel, and he knew,
although his eyes could not catch it, that in the valley round the head
of the road was the fishing village with the lights just coming in the
windows, and beyond the village the sloping shingly Cove. But he could
see only the dead-white road, and upon this his eyes were always fixed
as though he were expecting someone. And he could smell the sea-pinks
and the grass damp with evening dew, and the cold dust of the road, and
the sea-smell in the wind. And he waited, knowing that the time would
come when he would be told to descend the hill, pass through the
village, and step out, under the heavy grey clouds, upon the little
shingly beach. He was aware then that out at sea a dark, black ship was
riding, slipping a little with the tide, one light gleaming and swinging
against the pale glow of the dusky horizon. The church clock struck
four below the hill; he was still on the high road waiting, his eyes
straining for figures... He was prepared for some journey, because he
had at his feet a bundle. And he knew that he ought not to be there.
He knew that something awful was about to happen and that, when it had
occurred, he would be committed always to something or someone... A
little cold breeze then would rise in the hedges and against the silence
that followed the chiming of the clock he could hear first the bleating
of a sheep, then a sudden pounding of the sea as though the breakers
responded to the sudden rising of the wind, then the hoofs of a horse,
clear and hard, upon the road... At that moment the picture clouded
and was dim. Had this been a dream? Was it simply a confusion of summer
visits to Rafiel, stories told him by Mary, pictures in books (a fine
illustrated edition of “Redgauntlet” had been a treasure to him since
he was a baby), the exciting figure of the Captain, and the beginning of
spring? And yet the vision was so vividly detailed that it was precisely
like a remembered event. He had always seen things in pictures;
punishment meant standing in the corner counting the ships on the
wallpaper; summer holidays meant the deep green meadows of Cow Farm,
or a purple pool under an afternoon sun; religion meant walking up
the great wide aisle of the Cathedral in creaking boots and clean
underclothes, and so on. It was nothing new for him to make a picture,
and to let that picture stand for a whole complex phase of life. But
this? What had it to do with the Sea-Captain, and why was it, as he knew
in his heart that it was, wicked and wrong and furtive? For this had
begun as a high adventurous romance. There had been nothing wrong
in that first talk in the Meads, when the Captain had shown him the
tatooes. The wickedness of it had developed partly with his growing
longing to see the Captain again, partly with the meeting that actually
followed, and partly with the sense that grew and grew as the days
passed that the Captain was always watching him.

The Captain, during these weeks, seemed to be everywhere. Never was
there an afternoon that Jeremy walked out with Miss Jones and his
sisters that he did not appear. It was not very difficult to snatch
a conversation with him. Because the beauty of the spring weather
continued, the children went every day for a walk in the Meads, and on
at least three separate occasions Jeremy and the Captain enjoyed quite
long conversations together. These were, none of them, so good as that
first one had been. The Captain was not so genial, nor so light-hearted;
it seemed that he had something on his mind. Sometimes he put his hand
on Jeremy's shoulder, and the heavy pressure of his great fingers made
Jeremy tremble, partly with terror, partly with pleasure. His face,
also, was scarcely so agreeable as it had seemed at first sight. His
tremendous nose seemed to burn down upon Jeremy like a malignant fire.
His eyes were so small that sometimes they disappeared under his fat
cheeks altogether, or only gleamed like little sharp points of light
from under his heavy, shaggy eyebrows. Then, although he tried to make
his voice pleasant, Jeremy felt that that complaisant friendliness was
not his natural tone. Sometimes there would be a sharp, barking note
that made Jeremy jump and his cheek pale. The Captain told him no more
fascinating stories, and when Jeremy wanted to know about the ship with
the diamonds and rubies and the little sea village where she lay hid and
the Caribbees natives, and the chances of becoming a cabin boy, and
the further exploitation of the tatooes--all these things the Captain
brushed aside as though they no longer interested him in the least. He,
on the other hand, wanted now to know exactly where Jeremy lived, what
the house was like, where the back doors were, how the windows opened,
where Jeremy slept, and so on. Jeremy, pleased at this interest in
his daily life, told him as many things as he could, hoping to pass
on afterwards to more exciting topics; how, for instance, the kitchen
windows were fastened always last thing at night, but you could undo
them from the garden if you liked with your knife, and Jeremy knew this
because Uncle Samuel had done it once on a Sunday afternoon when the
maids were all out and he'd forgotten his door key. He would have told
the Captain all about the schoolroom and the toy village and the
Jampot and the fun they had had teasing Miss Jones had not, the Captain
fiercely told him that these things did not interest him, and that he
had better just answer the questions that were put to him. It was indeed
strange to see how, with every interview, the Captain grew fiercer and
fiercer and sharper and sharper. He made no allusions now to “'is
little nipper,” said nothing about that holy soul his mother, and never
mentioned his liking for Jeremy. There was evidently something on his
mind, and if he had seemed mysterious at their first meeting it was
nothing to the secrecy that he practised now.

And yet, in spite of all this, his hold over Jeremy grew and grew. That
dream of the bending white road was always with Jeremy. He could think
of nothing but the Captain, and while he was certainly afraid and would
jump at the slightest sound, he was also certainly excited beyond all
earlier experience. He longed, as he lay awake at night, to see the
Captain. He seemed to have always in front of his eyes the great wall of
a chest with the blue ship on it, and the bolster legs, and the gigantic
hands. Strangest of all was the sense of evil that came with the
attraction.

He longed to be in the man's company as he longed to do something that
he had been always told not to do, and when he caught sight of him
a sudden, hot, choking hand was pressed upon his heart, and he was
terrified, delighted, frightened, ashamed, all in one. The Captain
always alluded to the things that he would tell him, would show him
one day--“When you come to my little place I'll teach yer a thing or
two”--and Jeremy would wonder for hours what this little place would
be like and what the Captain would teach him. Meanwhile, he saw him
everywhere, even when he was not there--behind lamp-posts, at street
corners, behind the old woman's umbrella in the market-place, peering
round the statues in the Cathedral, jerking up his head from behind
chimney pots, looking through the nursery windows just when dusk was
coming on, in the passages, under stairs, out in the dark garden--and
always behind him that horrid dream of the dead-white road and the
shingly Cove... Yes, poor Jeremy was truly haunted.




IV


That Miss Jones suspected nothing of these meetings must be attributed
partly to that lady's habit of wrapping herself in her own thoughts on
her walks abroad, and partly to her natural short-sightedness. Once
Mary said that she had noticed “a horrid man with a red face” staring
at them; but Miss Jones, although she was not a vain woman, thought
it nevertheless quite natural that men should stare, and fancied more
frequently that they did so than was strictly the truth.

Jeremy, meanwhile, was occupied now with the thought as to what he would
do did the Captain really want him to go away with him. He discussed it
with himself, but he did not doubt what he would do; he would go. And he
would go, he knew, with fear and dread, and with a longing to stay, and
be warm in the schoolroom, and have jam for tea, and half an hour before
bedtime downstairs, and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays. But the Captain
could make him do anything... Yes, the Captain could make him do
anything...

His afternoon walks now were prolonged agonies. He would turn his head
at every moment, would stare into dark corners, would start at the sound
of steps. His sleep now was broken with horrid dreams, and he would jump
up and cry out; and one night he actually dreamt of his dead-white road
and the sounds that came up from below the hill, the bell and the sea,
and the distant rattle of the little carts.

Then the Captain drew near to the very house itself. He haunted Orange
Street, could be seen lounging against a lamp-post opposite the High
School, looked once into the very garden of the Coles, Jeremy watching
him with beating heart from the schoolroom window. It was incredible
to Jeremy that no one else of the house perceived him; but no one ever
mentioned him, and this made it appear all the more a dream, as though
the Captain were invisible to everyone save himself. He began to hate
him even more than he feared him, and yet with that hatred the pleasure
and excitement remained. I remember how, years ago in Polchester, when
I could not have been more than six years old, I myself was haunted
with exactly that same mixture of pleasure and horror by the figure of
a hunch-backed pedlar who used to come to our town. Many years after I
heard that he had been hung for the murder of some wretched woman who
had accompanied him on some of his journeys. I was not surprised; but
when I heard the story I felt then again the old thrill of mingled
pleasure and fear.

One windy afternoon, near dusk, when they were returning from their
walk, Jeremy suddenly heard the voice in his ear:

“I may be coming to visit yer one o' these nights. Keep yer eyes open
and yer tongue quiet if I do.”

Jeremy saw the figures of Miss Jones and his sisters pass round the
corner of the road.

“What for?” he gasped.

The Captain's figure seemed to swell gigantic against the white light of
the fading sky. The wind whistled about their ears.

“Just to visit yer, that's all. 'Cause I've taken a fancy to yer.” The
Captain chuckled and had vanished...

Jeremy flung one glance at the grey desolate road behind him, then ran
for his life to join the others.

What, after that, did he expect? He did not know. Only the Captain was
drawing closer, and closer, and closer.

He could feel now always his hot breath upon his ear. Two days after the
whispered dialogue in the road, that first promise of spring broke down
into a tempest of wind and rain. The Coles' house in Orange Street,
although it looked, with its stout, white stone, strong enough, was old
and shaky. Now, in the storm, it shook and wheezed and rattled in every
one of its joints. Jeremy, at ordinary times, loved the sound of the
wind about the house, when he himself was safe and warm and cosy; but
this was now another affair. Lying in his bed he could hear the screams
down the chimney, then the tug at his window-pane, the rattling
clutch upon the wood, then the sweep under the bed and the rush up the
wallpaper, until at last, from behind some badly defended spot where the
paper was thin, there would come a wailing, whistling screech as though
someone were being murdered in the next room. On other days Jeremy, when
he heard this screech, shivered with a cosy, creeping thrill; but now he
put his head under the bedclothes, shut his eyes very tight, and tried
not to see the Captain with his ugly nose and tiny gimlet eyes.

He would be half asleep.

“Come,” said the Captain from the window, “the boat is waiting! You
promised, you know. Come just as you are--no time to dress,” and poor
Jeremy would feel the great, heavy hand upon his shoulder and wake
shivering and shaking from head to foot.

On the third day following his last interview with the Captain he went
to bed a little reassured and comforted. Perhaps the Captain had gone
away. For three days he had seen and heard nothing of him at all.

That was a night of rain--rain that slashed and whipped the house as
though it would batter it to the ground. The rain would come with a
wild fury upon the panes, trembling with its excited anger, would crash
against the glass, then fall back and hang waiting for a further attack;
next the results of the first attack would slip and slide like the
crawling of a thousand snakes, then fall and drop slowly and heavily
as though every drop were foretelling some awful peril. Jeremy lay and
listened; but he resolved that to-night he would not be frightened,
would not think of the Captain.

He said the Lord's Prayer five times, then counted sheep jumping over
the gate, a safe solution for sleepless hours. He saw the sheep--first
one a very fat one, then one a very thin one; but the gate stood at
the bottom of a little hill, so that it was very difficult for the poor
creatures, who jumped and slipped back on the incline. Then a lot
of sheep insisted on jumping together, and he could hardly count
them--forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight.... He was asleep.

After a long, long time of soundlessness, of lying upon a sea that was
like a bed of down, and looking up, happily into clear blue light, he
was once more conscious of the rain. Yes, there it was with its sweeping
rush, its smash upon the pane, its withdrawal, its trickling patter and
heavy drops as though it were striking time. Yes, that was the rain and
that--What was that?

He was wide awake, lying back against his pillow, but his eyes staring
in front of them till they burnt. The house was absolutely dark,
absolutely silent, but between the attacks of the rain there was a
wound, something that had not to do with the house nor with the weather.
He strained with his ears, sitting up in bed, his hands clutching the
bed clothes. He heard it quite clearly now. Someone was moving in the
nursery.

With that the whole of his brain was awake and he knew quite clearly,
beyond a shadow of any doubt, what had happened; the Captain had come
to fetch him. With that knowledge an icy despair gripped him. He did
not want to go. Oh, he did not want to go! He was trembling from head
to foot so that the bed shook beneath him, his breath came in little hot
gasping pants, and his eyes were wide with terror. He was helpless. The
Captain would only say “Come,” and go he must, leave his warm house and
his parents whom he loved and Mary and Helen and Hamlet, yes, and even
Miss Jones. He would be dragged down the long white road, through the
lighted village, out on to the shiny beach, in a boat out to the dark
ship--and then he would be alone with the Captain, alone in the dark
ship, with the Captain's heavy hand upon his shoulder, his mouth
smiling, his great legs drawing him in as a spider draws a fly into its
web, and everyone asleep, only the stars and the dark water. He tried
to say the Lord's Prayer again, but the words would not come. The sweat
began to trickle down his nose...

Then he heard in the next room some movement against a piece of
furniture and a voice muttering. That decided him: better to go and face
it than to wait there, so as though he were moving in his sleep, he got
out of bed, crossed the floor and entered the schoolroom.

The first sound that he heard was the ticking of the old nursery clock,
a strange familiar voice in this awful world, then suddenly, although
the room was in black darkness, he himself was staring into blazing
light.

He started back and uttered a little cry, but even as he did so that
well-remembered hand was upon his shoulder and the well-known voice in
his ear:

“Move an inch, utter a sound, and I blow yer brains out, yer--” the
voice, very low, faded into, the dark. He was staring into a lantern,
and above the lantern was the dark body of the Captain. Then as he
looked up he was indeed near his last moment, for had he not been a
brave boy, old for his years, and determined, he would have cried out
with a scream that would have raised the house.

The Captain had no face... The Captain had no face... Only out of a deep
darkness those little eyes glittered like candle-points. Jeremy uttered
no sound. Then catching the Captain's coat because he trembled so, he
said: “I'm coming at once--but don't wake Mary and Helen. They'd be
frightened. May I get a coat, because it raining?”

“Coming!” whispered the Captain, his voice coming from that space in the
air where were his eyes. “You move one inch from 'ere or utter one sound
and I do yer in, yer--I'm watchin' yer, mind!”

The lantern light suddenly vanished. The room was black. There was no
sound but the ticking of the clock, and now the rain, which had seemed
to stop during this terrible dialogue, beat with friendly comfort once
more upon the pane. Jeremy stood there, his body held together as though
in an iron case, scarcely breathing. There was no more sound at all.
Quite clearly now Mary's snores could be heard coming from her room.

Jeremy had only one thought--only one thought in all the world. The
Captain did not want him. The Captain had gone and not taken him with
him. He was safe; he was freed; the terror was over and he was at
liberty.

At last he moved back to his room. He got into bed again. He was
terribly cold, and little spasms of shivers seized him, but he did not
care. The Captain was gone, and he had not taken him with him...




V


He was not aware whether he slept or no, but suddenly sunlight was in
the room, the bath-water was running, the canary was singing and Hamlet
was scratching upon his door. He jumped out of bed and let the dog in.
Then he heard Rose's voice from the next room:

“... and 'e's taken everything, 'e 'as. All the silver candlesticks and
the plate what was give to master by the Temp'rance Society, and Master
Jeremy's mug what he 'ad at 'is christening and all the knives and
forks--'e 'as--and the gold clock out o' the drorin'-room, and the mess!
Why, I says to Cook 'e couldn't 'ave made more mess, I say, not if 'e'd
come to do nothin' else. Grease everywhere, you never see nothin' like
it, and all the drawers open and the papers scattered about. Thank
'Eaven 'e never found Cook's earrings. Real gold they was, ever so many
carat and give to Cook ever so many years ago by 'er John. Poor woman!
She'd 'ave been in a terrible takin' if she'd lost 'em... And so quiet
too--not a sound and everyone sleepin' all round 'im. Wonderful 'ow
they does it! I thank the Lord I didn't 'ear 'im; I'd 'ave died of
fright-shouldn't like! Why, Cook says she knew a 'ouse once...”

But Jeremy did not listen, he did not care. As Hamlet sprang about him
and licked his hand h

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/3474