I
I am afraid that too great a part of this book is about old maids, but
it is hard for anyone who knows only the thriving bustling world of
today to realise how largely we children were hemmed in and surrounded
by a proper phalanx of elderly single ladies and clergymen. I don't
believe that we were any the worse for that, and to such heroines as
Miss Jane Maple, Miss Mary Trefusis and old Miss Jessamin Trenchard, I
here publicly acknowledge deep and lasting debt-but it did make our life
a little monotonous, a little unadventurous, a little circumscribed
-and because T am determined to give the whole truth and nothing but the
truth about the year of Jeremy's life that I am describing, this
book will also, I am afraid, be a little circumscribed, a little
unadventurous.
The elderly lady who most thoroughly circumscribed Jeremy was, of
course--putting Miss Jones, who was a governess and therefore did not
count, aside--Aunt Amy.
Now Aunt Amy was probably the most conceited woman in Polchester. There
is of course ordinary human conceit, of which every living being has his
or her share. I am not speaking of that; Miss Amy Trefusis might be said
to be fanatically conceited.
Although she was now a really plain elderly woman it is possible that
when she was a little girl she was pretty. In any case, it is certain
that she was spoiled when she was a little girl, and because she
was delicate and selfish she received a good deal more attention and
obedience from weak and vacillating elders than she deserved.
After her growing up she had a year or two of moderate looks and she
received, during this period, several proposals; these she refused
because they were not good enough and something better must be coming
very shortly, but what really came very shortly was middle-age, and it
came of course entirely unperceived by the lady. She dressed and behaved
as though she were still twenty, although her brother Samuel tried to
laugh her out of such absurdities. But no sister ever pays attention to
a brother on such matters, and Aunt Amy wore coloured ribbons and went
to balls and made eyes behind her fan for season after season. Then as
time passed she was compelled by her mirror to realise that she was
not quite so young as she had once been, so she hurriedly invented a
thrilling past history for herself, alluding to affair after affair that
had come to nothing only because she herself had ruthlessly slain them,
and dressing herself more reasonably, but with little signs and hints,
in the shape of chains and coloured bows and rings, that she could still
be young if she so pleased, and that she was open to offers, although
she could not promise them much encouragement. She liked the society of
Canons, and was to be seen a great deal with old Canon Borlase, who was
as great a flirt as he was an egotist, so that it did not matter to
him in the least with whom he flirted, and sat at the feet of old Canon
Morpheu, who was so crazy about the discoveries that he had made in the
life of Ezekiel that it was quite immaterial to him to whom he explained
them.
She descended from these clerical flights into the bosom of family life
with some natural discontent. Her brother Samuel she had always disliked
because he laughed at her; her sister she did not care for because she
was very innocently, poor lady, flaunting her superior married state;
and her brother-in-law she did not like because he always behaved as
though she were one of a vast public of elderly ladies who were useful
for helping in clerical displays, but were otherwise non-existent. Then
she hated children, so that she really often wondered why she continued
to live with her brother-in-law, but it was cheap, comfortable and
safe, and although she assured herself and everyone else that there were
countless homes wildly eager to receive her, it was perhaps just as well
not to put their eagerness too abruptly to the test.
There had been war between her and Jeremy since Jeremy's birth, but
it had been war of a rather mild and inoffensive character, consisting
largely in Jeremy on his side putting out his tongue at her when she
could not see him, and she on her side sending him to wash his ears when
they really did not require to be washed. She had felt always in Jeremy
an obstinate dislike of her, and as he had seemed to her neither a very
clever nor intelligent child she had consoled herself very easily with
the thought that he did not like her simply because he was stupid. So
it had been until this year, and then suddenly they had been flung into
sharper opposition. It was hard to say what had brought this about,
but it was perhaps that Jeremy had sprung suddenly from the unconscious
indifference of a young child into the active participation of a growing
boy. Whatever the truth might have been, the coming of Hamlet had drawn
their attitudes into positive conflict.
Aunt Amy had felt from the first that Hamlet laughed at her. Had you
asked her to state, as a part of her general experience, that she really
believed that dogs could laugh at human beings she would indignantly
have repudiated any idea so fantastic, nevertheless, unanalysed and
unconfronted, that was her conviction. The dog laughed at her, he
insulted her by walking into her bedroom with his muddy feet and then
pretending that he hadn't known that it was her bedroom, regarding her
through his hair with an ironical and malicious glance, barking suddenly
when she made some statement as though he enjoyed immensely an excellent
joke, but, above all, despising her, she felt, so that the wall of
illusion that she had built around herself had been pulled down by at
least one creature, more human, she knew, in spite of herself, than many
human beings. Therefore, she hated Hamlet, and scarcely a day passed
that she did not try to have him flung from the house, or at least kept
in the kitchen offices.
Hamlet had, however, won the hearts of the family; it was, indeed, Aunt
Amy alone to whom he had not thought it worth while to pay court. To her
alone he would not come when she called, by her alone he would not
be cajoled, even though she offered him sugary tea, his deadliest
temptation. No, he sat and looked at her through his hair, his fiery eye
glinting, his peaked beard ironically humorous, his leg stuck out from
his body, a pointing signal of derision.
She resolved to wait for an opportunity when she might conquer Hamlet
and Jeremy together, but her power in the house was slight, so long as
Mr. and Mrs. Cole were there. “If I only had the children to myself,”
she would say, “I would improve their manners in many ways. Poor
Alice--!” Then suddenly she did have them. At the beginning of May Mr.
Cole was summoned to take a mission to the seamen of Drymouth, and Mrs.
Cole, who had relations in Drymouth, accompanied him. They would be
absent from Pelchester a whole week.
“Oh, won't Aunt Amy be a nuisance,” said Jeremy, realising the
situation. Then turning to Mary he added: “We'll pretend to do what she
tells us and not do it really. That's much the easiest.”
A week is a short time, especially at the beginning of a shining and
burning May, but Aunt Amy did her best not only with the children but
with the servants, and even old Jordan, the gardener, who had been with
the Cole family for twenty years. During that short week the cook, the
parlourmaid, Rose, the housemaid, and the bootboy all gave notice, and
Mrs. Cole was only able to keep them (on her return) by raising the
wages of all of them. Jordan, who was an old man with a long white
beard, said to her when she advised him to plant pinks where he had
planted tulips and tulips where he had planted pinks, and further
inquired why the cauliflower that he sent in was so poor and the
cabbages so small: “Leave things alone, Miss, Nature's wiser than we
be, not but what you mayn't mean well, but fussin's never done any good
where Nature's concerned, nor never will”; and when she said that he was
very rude to her, he shook his head and answered:
“Maybe yes, and maybe no. What's rude to one ain't rude to another”--out
of which answer she could make nothing at all.
In the schoolroom she sustained complete defeat. At the very outset she
was baffled by Miss Jones. She had always despised Miss Jones as a
poor unfortunate female who was forced to teach children in her old
age because she must earn her living--a stupid, sentimental, cowed,
old woman at whom the children laughed. She found now that the children
instead of laughing at her laughed with her, formed a phalanx of
protection around her and refused to be disobedient. Miss Jones herself
was discovered to have a dry, rather caustic, sense of humour that Aunt
Amy felt to be impertinence, but could not penetrate.
“And is that really how you teach them history, Miss Jones? Not quite
the simplest way, surely... I remember an excellent governess whom we
once had--”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Jones, gently, “you would give them a history
lesson yourself, Miss Trefusis. I would be so glad to pick up any little
hints--”
“I have, of course, no time,” said Aunt Amy hurriedly, “but, speaking
generally, I am afraid I can't approve altogether of your system.”
“It isn't very good, I'm afraid,” said Miss Jones weakly. “The children
would be glad, I know, to have a few hints from you if you could spare a
moment--”
Jeremy, who was listening, giggled, tried to turn the giggle into a
sneeze and choked.
“Jeremy!” said Aunt Amy severely.
“Oh, do look, Aunt Amy!” cried Mary, always Jeremy's faithful ally, “all
your hairpins are dropping out!”
She devoted herself then to Jeremy and worried him in every possible
way, and after two days of this he hated her with a deep and bitter
hatred, very different from that earlier teasing of Miss Jones. That had
sprung from a sudden delicious discovery of power, and had been directed
against no one. This was a real personal hatred that children of a less
solid and tenacious temperament than Jeremy would have been incapable of
feeling.
He did not laugh at her, he did not tease her, he no longer put out his
tongue at her. He was older than that now--he was simply reserved and
silent, watching her with his large eyes, his square body set, and
resolved as though he knew that his moment would come.
Her experience with him was baffling. She punished him, petted him, she
ignored him, she stormed at him; it seemed that she would do anything
could she only win from him an acknowledgment of her power, her
capability. But she could not. He only said: “Yes, Aunt Amy.” “No, Aunt
Amy.”
She burst out: “You're a sullen, wicked little boy, Jeremy. Do you know
what happens to little boys who sulk?”
“No, Aunt Amy.”
“They grow into cross, bad-tempered men whom nobody likes and nobody
trusts. Do you want to be like that when you're a man?”
“I don't care.”
“You know what happened to 'Don't Care.' I shall have to punish you if
you're rude to me.”
“What have I done that's rude?”
“You mustn't speak to me like that. Is that the way you speak to your
mother?”
“No, Aunt Amy.”
“Well, then, if you don't speak to your mother like that, you mustn't
speak to me like that, either.”
“No, Aunt Amy.”
“Well, then...”
This hatred was quite new to him. He had once, years ago, hated a
black-faced doll that had been given to him. He had not known why he
hated it, but there it had been. He had thrown it out of the window, and
the gardener had found it and brought it into the house again, battered
and bruised, but still alive, with its horrid red smile, and this had
terrified him... He had begun to burn it, and the nurse had caught him
and slapped him. He had begun to cut it with scissors, and when the
sawdust flowed he was more terrified than ever. But that doll was quite
different from Aunt Amy. He was not terrified of her at all. He hated
her. Hated the fringe of her black hair, the heavy eyelashes, the thin
down on her upper lip, the way that the gold cross fell up and down on
her breast, her thin, blue-veined hands, her black shoes. She was his
first enemy, and he waited, as an ambush hides and watches, for his
opportunity...
II
One of our nicest old maids, Miss Maddison, gave every year what she
called her “early summer party.” This was different from all our other
parties, because it occurred neither in the summer nor in the winter,
but always during those wonderful days when the spring first began
to fade into the high bright colours, the dry warmth, the deep green
shadows of the heat of the year. It was early in May that Miss Maddison
had her party, and we played games on her little sloping green lawn,
and peered over her pink-brick wall down on to the brown roofs of the
houses below the Close, and had a tremendous tea of every kind of cake
and every kind of jam in her wainscoted dining-room that looked out
through its tall open windows on to the garden. Those old houses that
run in a half-moon round the Close, and face the green sward and the
great western door of the Cathedral, are the very heart of Polchester.
Walking down the cobbled street, one may still to-day look through the
open door, down the dusky line of the little hall, out into the swimming
colour of the garden beyond. In these little gardens, what did not grow?
Hollyhocks, pinks, tulips, nasturtiums, pansies, lilies of the valley,
roses, honeysuckle, sweet-williams, stocks--I remember them all at their
different seasons in that muddled, absurd profusion. I can smell them
now, can see them in their fluttering colours, the great grey wall of
the Cathedral, with its high carved door and watching saints behind me,
the sun beating on to the cobbles, the muffled beat of the summer day,
the sleepy noises of the town, the pigeons cutting the thin, papery blue
into arcs and curves and circles, the little lattice-windowed houses,
with crooked chimneys and shining doors, smiling down upon me. I can
smell, too, that especial smell that belonged to those summer hours, a
smell of dried blotting-paper, of corn and poppies from the fields, of
cobble-stones and new-baked bread and lemonade; and behind the warmth
and colour the cool note of the Cathedral bell echoed through the town,
down the High Street, over the meads, across the river, out into the
heart of the dark woods and the long spaces of the summer fields. I can
see myself, too, toiling up the High Street, my cap on the back of my
head, little beads of perspiration on my forehead, and my eyes always
gazing into the air, so that I stumbled over the cobbles and knocked
against doorsteps. All these things had to do with Miss Maddison's
parly, and it was always her party that marked the beginning of them
for us; she waited for the fine weather, and so soon as it came the
invitations were sent out, the flower-beds were trimmed, the little
green wooden seats under the mulberry tree were cleaned, and Poupee, the
black poodle, was clipped.
It happened this year that Miss Maddison gave her party during the
very week that Mr. and Mrs. Cole went to Drymouth. She sent out her
invitations only three days before the great event, because the summer
had come with so fine a rush. “Master Jeremy and the Misses Cole...
Would they give Miss Maddison the pleasure...?” Yes, of course they
would. Aunt Amy would take them.
On the morning of the great day Jeremy poured the contents of his
watering-can upon Aunt Amy's head. It was a most unfortunate accident,
arranged obviously by a malignant fate. Jeremy had been presented with
a pot of pinks, and these, every morning, he most faithfully watered. He
had a bright-red watering-can, bought with his own money, and, because
it held more water than the pinks needed, he was in the daily habit of
emptying the remnant in a glittering shower out of the pantry window
on to the bed nearest the garden wall. Upon this morning someone called
him; he turned his head; the water still flowed, and Aunt Amy, hatless
and defenceless, received it as it tumbled with that sudden rush which
always seizes a watering-can at its last gasp. Jeremy was banished into
his bedroom, where he employed the sunny morning in drawing pictures of
Aunt Amy as a witch upon the wallpaper. For doing this he was caned
by Aunt Amy herself with a ruler, and at the end of the operation
he laughed and said she hadn't hurt him at all. In return for this
impertinence he was robbed, at luncheon, of his pudding--which was,
of course, on that very day, marmalade pudding--and then, Mary being
discovered putting some of hers into a piece of paper, to be delivered
to him in due course, they were both stood in different corners of the
room “until you say you're sorry.”
When the jingle arrived at three o'clock they had still not made this
acknowledgment, and Jeremy said he never would, “not if he lived till
he was ninety-nine.” At quarter past three Jeremy might have been seen
sitting up very straight in the jingle, his face crimson from washing
and temper. He was wearing his new sailor suit, which tickled him and
was hot and sticky; he sat there devoting the whole of his energies to
the business of hating Aunt Amy.
As I have said, he had never hated anyone before, and he was surprised
at the glow of virtuous triumph that this new emotion spread over his
body. He positively loved to hate Aunt Amy, and as Parkes, the pony,
slowly toiled up the hill to the Cathedral, he sat stiff and proud with
an almost humorous anger. Then, as they turned over the hot shining
cobbles into the Close and saw the green trees swimming in the sun, he
turned his mind to the party. What games would they play? Who would be
there? What would there be for tea? He felt creeping over him the stiff
shyness that always comes when one is approaching a party, and he wished
that the first handshaking and the first plunge into the stares of the
critical guests might be over. But he did not really care. His hatred
of Aunt Amy braced him up; when one was capable of so fine and manly an
emotion as this hatred, one need not bother about fellow-guests. Then
the jingle stopped outside a house immediately opposite the great
west-end door of the Cathedral; in the little hall Miss Maddison was
standing, and from the glittering garden behind her the sun struck
through the house into the shadowed street.
Jeremy's public manners were, when he pleased, quite beautiful--“the
true, old-fashioned courtesy,” gushing friends of the Cole family used
to say. He was preparing to be very polite now, when suddenly the voice
of the Dean's Ernest ordering people about in the garden struck upon his
ear. He had not seen the Dean's Ernest for nearly three months, for the
very good reason that that gentleman had been experiencing his first
term at his private school. Last year young Ernest and Jeremy had been,
on the whole, friendly, although Ernest, who was nine, and strong for
his age, had always patronised. And now? Jeremy longed to inform his
friend that he also shortly would proceed to school, that in another
six months' time there would be practically no difference between them.
Nevertheless, at the present moment there was a difference... Ernest had
a whole term to his credit.
New arrivals gently insinuated the Cole family into the garden. Helen,
proud and cold, Mary, blinking and nervous, stood pressed close together
whilst other little girls stared and giggled, moved forward and then
backward again, until suddenly Canon Lasker's Emily, who was fifteen
and had such long legs that she was known as “the Giraffe,” came up
and said: “Isn't it hot! Do you play croquet? Please-do! I'll
have--the--blue ball...” And the Coles were initiated.
Meanwhile, Aunt Amy had said: “Now, Jeremy, dear, run about and make
friends.” Which so deeply infuriated him that he choked. Oh! supposing
the Dean's Ernest had heard her!...
And he had! A mocking voice behind him said: “Now, Jeremy, dear--”
Jeremy turned round and beheld the Dean's Ernest mockingly waiting his
retort. And he could not retort. No words would come, and he could only
stand there, his cheeks flushed, aware that Ernest had grown and grown
during those three months, that he wore a straw hat with a black-and-red
ribbon upon it, that round his long ugly neck was a stiff white collar,
and across his waistcoat a thick silver watch-chain.
“Hallo!” said Jeremy.
“Hallo!” said the new Ernest scornfully.
A long pause.
Then Ernest, turning on his heel, said to someone behind him: “Let's get
away from all these girls!” The tears burnt in Jeremy's eyes, hot and
salt. He clenched his fists and gazed upon a garden that swam in a
mist of tears and sunlight. He felt a sudden strange impulse of family
affection. He would like to have gathered behind him his father and
mother, Mary, Helen, Hamlet, Uncle Samuel--yes, and even Aunt Amy, and
to have advanced not only upon Ernest, but upon the whole Dean's family.
It would have given him great pleasure to have set his teeth into the
fat legs of the Dean himself; he would gladly have torn the hat from
the head of Mrs. Dean... Upon Ernest there was no torture he would not
employ.
He would get even; he resolved that before he left that house he would
have his revenge.
Kind Miss Maddison, tripping along and seeing him as a pathetic little
boy in a sailor suit without guile or malice, swept him into an “I spy”
party composed for the most part of small girls who fell down and cried
and said they would go home.
Jeremy, hiding behind a tree, watched the thin back of Ernest as it
lifted itself autocratically above two small boys who looked up to him
with saucer-eyes. Ernest was obviously talking about his school. Jeremy,
lost in the contemplation of his vengeance, forgot his game, and was
taken prisoner with the greatest of ease. He did not care. The afternoon
was spoilt for him. He was not even hungry. Why could he not go to
school to-morrow, and then challenge Ernest to combat? But he might
challenge Ernest without going to school... He had never fought a real
fight, but the sight of his enemy's thin, peaky body was encouraging.
“Now, Jeremy, dear,” said Miss Maddison, “it's your turn to hide...”
Soon they all went in to tea. Everyone was thoroughly at home by this
time, and screamed and shouted quite in the most natural manner in the
world. The long table stretched down the whole room, almost from wall to
wall; the sunlight played in pools and splashes upon the carpet and the
flowers and the pictures. There was every sort of thing to eat--thin
bread-and-butter rolled up into little curly sandwiches, little cakes
and big cakes, seed cakes and sugar cakes, and, of course, saffron buns,
jam in little shining dishes, and hot buttered toast so buttery that, it
dripped on to your fingers.
Jeremy sat next to Mary, and behind him hovered Aunt Amy. Only half an
hour ago how this would have angered him! To have her interfering with
him, saying: “Not two at a time, Jeremy,” or “Pass the little girl the
sugar, Jeremy--remember your manners.” or “Not so big a piece, Jeremy.”
But now--he did not know... She was one of the family, and he felt as
though the Dean's Ernest had scorned her as well as himself. Also Mary.
He felt kind to Mary, and when she whispered “Are you enjoying it,
Jeremy?” he answered “Yes; are you?” Not because he was really enjoying
it, but because he knew that she wanted him to say that.
He could see Ernest from where he sat, and he knew that Ernest was
laughing at him. He remembered that he had given Ernest three splendid
marbles, just before his departure to school, as a keepsake. How he
wished that he had kept them! He would never give Ernest anything again
except blows. Mary might be tiresome sometimes, but she was his sister,
and he greatly preferred her as a girl to Ernest's sisters. He could see
them now, greedy, ugly things...
“Now, Jeremy, wipe your mouth,” said Aunt Amy.
He obeyed at once.
III
Tea over, they all trooped out into the garden again. The evening light
now painted upon the little green lawn strange trembling shadows of
purple and grey; the old red garden wall seemed to have crept forwards,
as though it would protect the house and the garden from the night; and
a sky of the faintest blue seemed, with gentle approval, to bless the
quiet town fading into dusk beneath it. Over the centre of the lawn the
sun was still shining, and there it was warm and light. But from every
side the shadows stealthily crept forward. A group of children played
against the golden colour, their white dresses patterns that formed
figures and broke and formed again. The Cathedral bell was ringing for
evensong, and its notes stole about the garden, and in and out amongst
the children, as though some guardian spirit watching over their safety
counted their numbers.
Jeremy, feeling rather neglected and miserable, stood in the shadow near
the oak on the farther side of the lawn. He did not want to play with
those little girls, and yet he was hurt because he had not been asked.
The party had been a most miserable failure, and a year ago it would
have been such a success. He did not know that he was standing now, in
the middle of his eighth year, at the parting of the ways; that only
yesterday he had been a baby, and that he would never be a baby again.
He did not feel his independence--he felt only inclined to tears and
a longing, that he would never, never confess, even to himself, that
someone should come and comfort him! Nevertheless, even at this very
moment, although he did not know it, he, a free, independent man, was
facing the world for the first time on his own legs. His mother might
have realised it had she been there--but she was not. Mary, however, was
there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was
always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She
slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she
always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he
could so easily hurt her, said:
“Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?”
“I don't care,” he answered gruffly.
“It isn't any fun without you.” She paused, and added: “Would you mind
if I stayed here too?”
“I'd rather you played,” he said; and yet he was comforted by her,
determined, as he was, that she should never know it!
“I'd rather stay,” she said, and then gazed, with that melancholy stare
through her large spectacles that always irritated Jeremy, out across
the garden.
“I'm all right,” he said again; “only my stocking tickles, and I can't
get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate the
Dean's Ernest?”
“Yes, I do,” she answered fervently, although she had not thought about
him at all--enough for her that Jeremy should hate him! Then she gasped:
“Here he comes--”
He was walking towards them with a swagger of his long yellow neck
and his thin leggy body that Jeremy found especially offensive. Jeremy
“bristled,” and Mary was conscious of that bristling.
“Hallo!” said Ernest.
“Hallo!” said Jeremy.
“What rot these silly games are!” said Ernest. “Why can't they have
something decent, like cricket?”
Jeremy had never played cricket, so he said nothing. “At our school,”
said Ernest, “we're very good at cricket. We win all our matches
always--”
“I don't care about your school,” said Jeremy, breathing through his
nose.
The Dean's Ernest was obviously surprised by this; he had not expected
it. His pale neck began to flush.
“Look here, young Cole,” he said, “none of your cheek.”
This was a new dialect to Jeremy, who had no friends who went to school.
All he said, however, breathing more fiercely than before, was: “I don't
care--”
“Oh, don't you?” said Ernest. “Now, look here--” Then he paused,
apparently uncertain, for a moment, of his courage. The sight of Mary's
timorous anxiety, however, reassured him, and he continued: “It's all
right for you, this sort of thing. You ought to be in the nursery with
your old podge-faced nurse. Kids like you oughtn't to be allowed out of
their prams.”
“I don't care,” said Jeremy again, seeing in front of him the whole
family of the Reverend Dean. “Your school isn't much anyway, I expect,
and I'm going to school in September, and I'll wear just the same things
as you do and--”
He wanted to comment upon the plain features of Ernest's sisters, but
his gentlemanly courtesy restrained him. He paused for breath, and
Ernest seized his advantage.
“You have to have an old aunt to look after you anyway--an ugly old
aunt. I wouldn't have an old aunt always hanging over me--'Now, Jeremy
dear--' 'Blow your nose, Jeremy dear--' 'Wipe your feet, Jeremy dear.'
Look at the things she wears and the way she walks. If I did have to
have an aunt always I'd have a decent one, not an old clothes bag.”
What happened to Jeremy at the moment? Did he recollect that only a few
hours before he had been hating Aunt Amy with a fine frenzy of hatred?
For nearly a week he had been chafing under her restraint, combating her
commands, defying her orders. He had been seeing her as everything that
the Dean's Ernest had but now been calling her. Now he only saw her as
someone to be defended, someone who was his, someone even who depended
on him for support. He would have challenged a whole world of Deans in
her defence.
He said something, but no one could hear his words; then he sprang upon
the startled Ernest.
It was not a very distinguished combat; it was Jeremy's first battle,
and he knew at that time nothing of the science of fighting. The Dean's
Ernest, in spite of his term at school, also knew nothing--and the
Dean's Ernest was a coward...
It lasted but a short while, for Mary, after the first pause of
horrified amazement (aware only that Ernest was twice as big as her
Jeremy), ran to appeal to authority. Jeremy himself was aware neither of
time nor prudence. He realised immediately that Ernest was a coward, and
this realisation filled him with joy and happiness. He had seized Ernest
by his long yellow neck, and, with his other hand, he struck at eyes and
cheeks and nose. He did not secure much purchase for his blows because
their bodies were very close against one another, but he felt the soft
flesh yield and suddenly something wet against his hand which must, he
knew, be blood. And all the time he was thinking to himself: “I'll teach
him to say things about Aunt Amy! Aunt Amy's mine! I'll teach him! He
shan't touch Aunt Amy! He shan't touch Aunt Amy!...”
Ernest meanwhile kicked and kicked hard; he also tried to bite Jeremy's
hand and also to pull his hair. But his own terror handicapped him;
every inch of his body was alarmed, and that alarm prevented the freedom
of his limbs. Then when he felt the blood from his nose trickle on to
his cheek his resistance was at an end; panic flooded over him like
water. He broke away and flung himself howling on to the ground, kicking
his legs and screaming:
“It isn't fair! He's bitten me! Take him away! Take him away!”
Jeremy himself was no beautiful sight. His hair was wild, his white navy
collar crumpled and soiled, the buttons of his tunic torn, his stocking
down, and his legs already displaying purple bruises. But he did not
care; he was well now; he was no longer unhappy.
He had beaten Ernest and he was a man; he had risen victorious from his
first fight, and Authority might storm as it pleased. Authority soon
arrived, and there were, of course, many cries and exclamations. Ernest
was led away still howling; Jeremy, stubborn, obstinate, and silent, was
also led away.... A disgraceful incident.
Aunt Amy, of course, was disgusted. Couldn't leave the boy alone one
minute but he must misbehave himself, upset the party, be the little
ruffian that he always was. She had always said that his mother spoiled
him, and here were the fruits of that foolishness. How could she ever
say enough to Miss Maddison? Her delightful party completely ruined!...
Shocking!... Shocking!... Too terrible!. .. And Ernest, such a quiet,
well-behaved little boy as a rule. It must have been Jeremy who...
While they were waiting in the decent dusk of Miss Maddison's
sitting-room for a cleaned and chastened Jeremy, Mary touched her aunt's
arm and whispered in her nervous voice:
“Aunt Amy--Jeremy hit Ernest because he said rude things about you.”
“About me! Nonsense, child.”
“No, but it was, really. Ernest said horrid things about you, and then
Jeremy hit him.”
“About me? What things?”
“That you were ugly,” eagerly continued Mary--never a tactful child,
and intent now only upon Jeremy's reputation--“and wore ugly clothes and
horrid things. He did really. I heard it all.”
Aunt Amy was deeply moved. Her conceit, her abnormal all-embracing
conceit was wounded--yes, even by so insignificant a creature as the
Dean's Ernest; but she was also unexpectedly touched. She would have
greatly preferred not to be touched, but there it was, she could not
help herself. She did not know that, in all her life before, anyone had
ever fought for her, and that now of all champions in the world fate
should have chosen Jeremy, who was, she had supposed, her enemy--never
her defender!
And that horrid child of the Dean--she had always disliked him, with
his long yellow neck and watery eyes! How dared he say such things about
her! He had always been rude to her. She remembered once--
Jeremy arrived, washed, brushed, and obstinate. He would, of course, be
scolded to within an inch of his life, and he did not care. He had seen
the Dean's Ernest howling and kicking on the ground; he had soiled his
straw hat for him, dirtied his stiff white collar for him, and made
his nose bleed. He glared at his aunt (one eye was rapidly disappearing
beneath a blue bruise), and he was proud, triumphant, and very tired.
Farewells were made--again many apologies--“Nothing, I assure you,
nothing. Boys will be boys, I know,” from Miss Maddison.
Then they were seated in the jingle, Jeremy next to Aunt Amy, awaiting
his scolding. It did not come. Aunt Amy tried; she knew what she should
say. She should be very angry, disgusted, ashamed. She could not be any
of these things. That horrid boy had insulted her. She was touched and
proud as she had never been touched and proud in her life before.
Jeremy waited, and then as nothing came his weariness grew upon him. As
the old fat pony jogged along, as the evening colours of street and sky
danced before him, sleep came nearer and nearer.
He nodded, recovered, nodded and nodded again. His body pressed closer
to Aunt Amy's, leaned against her. His head rested upon her shoulder.
After a moment's pause she put her arm round him--so, holding him, she
stared, defiantly and crossly, upon the world.