I
Always in after years Jeremy remembered that party of Miss Maddison's,
not because it had been there that he had won his first fight, but for
the deeper reason that from that day his life received a new colour,
woven into the texture of it; even now when he thinks of those hours
that followed Miss Maddison's party he catches his breath and glances
around him to see whether everything is safe. The children, on arriving
home that evening, found that their father and mother had already
returned from Drymouth. Jeremy, sleepy though he was, rushed to his
mother, held her hand, explained his black eye, and then suddenly, in a
way that he had, fell asleep, there as he was, and had to be carried up
to bed.
When he awoke next morning his first thought was of his mother. He did
not know why; she was so definitely part of the background of his daily
life that he felt too sure of her continual and abiding presence to need
deliberate thought of her. But this morning he wanted to get up quickly
and find her. Perhaps her absence had made him feel more insecure,
but there had also been something that night, something in her face,
something in the touch of her hand.
And the other thing that he realised was that summer had truly come.
He knew at once that hot smell that pressed even through the closed
window-panes of his room; the bars and squares of light on the floor
when he jumped out of bed and stood upon them seemed to burn the soles
of his feet, and the rays of light on the ceiling quivered as only
summer sunlight can quiver. The two windows of his bedroom looked back
behind Polchester over fields and hedges to a dim purple line of wood. A
tiny stream ran through the first two fields, and this little river
was shining now with a white hot light that had yet the breeze of the
morning ruffling it. He ran to his window and opened it. Beyond the wall
that bordered their house was a little brown path, and down this path,
even as he watched, a company of cows were slowly wandering along.
Already they were flapping their ears lazily in anticipation of the
flies, and the boy who was driving them was whistling as one only
whistles on a summer morning. He could see the buttercups, too, in the
nearest field; they seemed to have sprung to life in the space of a
night. Someone was pulling the rope of a well somewhere and someone else
was pouring water out upon some stone court. Even as he watched, a bee
came blundering up to his window, hesitated for a moment, and then went
whirring off again, and through all the sun and glitter and the sparkle
of the little river there was a scent of pinks, and mignonette, and
even, although it could not really be so, of the gorse. The sky was a
pale white blue, so pale that it was scarcely any colour at all and
a few puffs of clouds, dead white like the purest smoke, hovered in
dancing procession, above the purple wood. The sun burnt upon his bare
feet and his head and his hands.
This coming of summer meant so much more to him than merely the
immediate joy of it--it meant Rafiel and Cow Farm and the Cove and green
pools with crabs in them, and shrimping and paddling and riding home in
the evening on haycarts, and drinking milk out of tin cans, and cows and
small pigs, and peeling sticks and apples, and collecting shells, and
fishermen's nets, and sandwiches, and saffron buns mixed with sand,
and hot ginger beer, and one's ears peeling with the sun, and church on
Sunday with the Rafiel sheep cropping the grass just outside the church
door, and Dick Marriott, the fisherman, and slipping along over the
green water, trailing one's fingers in the water, in his boat, and fishy
smells by the sea-wall, and red masses of dog-fish on the pier, and the
still cool feel of the farmhouse sheets just after getting into bed--all
these things and a thousand more the coming of summer meant to Jeremy.
But this morning he did not feel his customary joy. Closing his window
and dressing slowly, he wondered what was the matter. What could it be?
It was not his eye--certainly it was a funny colour this morning and it
hurt when you touched it, but he was proud of that. No, it was not his
eye. And it was not the dog, who came into his room, after scratching
on the door, and made his usual morning pretence of having come for any
other purpose than to see his friend and master, first looking under the
bed, then going up to the window pretending to gaze out of it (which he
could not do), barking, then rolling on a square of sunlit carpet,
and, after that, lying on his back, his legs out stiff, his ridiculous
“Imperial” pointed and ironical, then suddenly turning, with a twist on
his legs, rushing at last up to Jeremy, barking at him, laughing at
him, licking him, and even biting his stockings--last of all seizing a
bedroom slipper and rushing wildly into the schoolroom with it.
No, there was nothing the matter with Hamlet. Nor was there anything the
matter with Miss Jones, free, happily, from her customary neuralgia,
and delighted with the new number of the Church Times. Nor was it the
breakfast, which to-day included bacon and strawberry jam. Nor, finally,
was it Mary or Helen, who, pleased with the summer weather (and Mary
additionally pleased with the virtues of Lance as minutely recorded in
the second volume of “The Pillars of the House”), were both in the most
amiable of tempers. No, it must be something inside Jeremy himself.
He waited until the end of breakfast to ask his question:
“Can I go and see Mother, Miss Jones?”
Mary and Helen looked across at him inquisitively.
“What do you want to see your mother for now, Jeremy? You always see her
at twelve o'clock.” Miss Jones pushed her spectacles lower upon her nose
and continued her reading.
“I want to.”
“Well, you can't now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I say not--that's enough.”
But Jeremy was gentle to-day. He got off his chair, went round to Miss
Jones's chair, and, looking up at her out of his bruised eye, said in
the most touching voice:
“But, please, Miss Jones, I want to. I really do.”
Then she said what he had known all the time was coming:
“I'm afraid you won't see your mother to-day, dear. She's not well.
She's in bed.”
“Why? Is she ill?”
“She's tired after her journey yesterday, I expect.”
He said no more.
He tried during the whole of that day not to think of his mother, and he
found that, for the first time in his life, he could do nothing else but
think of her. During the morning he sat very silently over his lessons,
did all that he was told, did not once kick Mary under the table, nor
ask Miss Jones to sharpen his pencil, nor make faces at Hamlet. Once or
twice, in a way that he had, he leaned his head on his hand as though
he were an ancient professor with a whole library of great works behind
him, and when Miss Jones asked him whether he had a headache he said:
“No, thank you,” instead of seizing on the wonderful opportunity of
release that such a question offered him. When they all went for a walk
in the afternoon, he sprang for a moment into something of his natural
vivacity. They came upon a thin, ill-shaven tramp dressed as a sailor,
with a patch over one eye, producing terrible discordance from a fiddle.
This individual held in one hand a black tin cup, and at his side
crouched a mongrel terrier, whose beaten and dishevelled appearance
created at once hopes in the breast of the flamboyant Hamlet. This
couple were posted just outside Mr. Poole's second-hand bookshop, close
to the “2d.” box, and for a moment Jeremy was enthralled. He wanted to
give the hero his week's penny, and upon finding that his week's
penny was not, owing to sweet purchases on the previous day, he began
elaborate bargainings with Miss Jones as to the forestalling of future
pennies. Meanwhile, Hamlet leapt, with every sign of joyful expectation,
upon the pauper dog; the blind sailor began to hit wildly about with
his stick, Mr. Poole's “2d.” box was upset, and the sailor's black patch
fell off, revealing him as the possessor of two beautiful eyes, just
like any other gentleman, and a fine, vigorous stock of the best
Glebeshire profanities. Mr. Poole, an irascible old man, himself came
out, a policeman approached, two old ladies from the Close, well known
to Jeremy, were shocked by the tramp, and the Cathedral bell, as though
it had just awoken up to its real responsibilities, suddenly began to
ring.
All this was, of course, delightful to Jeremy, and offered so many
possible veins of interest that he could have stayed there for hours.
He wanted very badly to ask the sailor why he covered up a perfectly
wholesome eye with a black patch, and he would have liked to see what
Hamlet could do in the direction of eating up the scattered remnants of
Mr. Poole's “2d.” box; but he was dragged away by the agitated hand
of Miss Jones, having to console himself finally with a wink from the
august policeman, who, known throughout Polchester as Tom Noddy, was a
kindly soul and liked gentlemanly little boys, but persecuted the street
sort.
For a moment this exciting adventure carried him away, and he even
listened for a minute or two to Mary, who, seizing her opportunity,
began hurriedly: “Once upon a time there lived a sailor, very thin,
and he never washed, and he had a dog and a violin--” But soon he
remembered, and sighed and said: “Oh, bother, Mary!” and then walked
on by himself. And still, all through that hot afternoon, when even the
Rope Walk did not offer any shade, and when the Pol was of so clear a
colour that you could see trout and emerald stones and golden sand as
under glass, and when Hamlet was compelled to run ahead and find a piece
of shade and lie there stretched, panting, with his tongue out, until
they came up to him--even all these signs of a true and marvellous
summer did not relieve Jeremy of his burden. Something horrible was
going to happen. He knew it with such certainty that he wondered how
Mary and Helen could be so gaily light-hearted, and despised them for
their carelessness. This was connected in some way with the hot weather;
he felt as though, were a cold breeze suddenly to come, and rain to
fall, he would be happy again. There had been once a boy, older than
he, called Jimmy Bain, a fat, plump boy, who had lived next door to the
Coles. Whenever he had the opportunity he bullied Jeremy, pinching his
arms, putting pins into his legs, and shouting suddenly into his ears.
Jeremy, who had feared Johnny Bain, had always “felt” the stout youth's
arrival before he appeared. The sky had seemed to darken, the air to
thicken, the birds to gather in the “rooky” wood.
He had trembled and shaken, his teeth had chattered and his throat grown
dry for no reason at all. As he had once felt about Johnny Bain so
now he felt about life in general. Something horrible was going to
happen.... Something to do with Mother.... As he came up the road to
their house his heart beat so that he could not hear his own steps.
II
They entered the house, and at once even Mary, preoccupied as she was
with her story about the sailor, noticed that something was wrong.
“Rose! Rose!” she called out loudly.
“Hush!” said Miss Jones. “You must be quiet, dear.”
“Why?” said Mary. “I want Rose to--”
“Your mother isn't at all well, dear. I--”
And she was interrupted by Rose, who, coming suddenly downstairs, with a
face very different from her usual cheerful one, said something to Miss
Jones in a low voice.
Miss Jones gave a little cry: “So soon?... A girl....” And then added:
“How is she?”
Then Rose said something more, which the children could not catch, and
vanished.
“Very quietly, children,” said Miss Jones, in a voice that trembled;
“and you mustn't leave the schoolroom till I tell you. Your mother--”
She broke off as though she were afraid of showing emotion.
“What is it?” said Jeremy in a voice that seemed new to them all--older,
more resolute, strangely challenging for so small a boy.
“Your mother's very ill, Jeremy, dear. You must be a very good boy, and
help your sisters.”
“Mightn't I go for just a minute?”
“No, certainly not.”
They all went upstairs. Then, in the schoolroom, Miss Jones said an
amazing thing. She said:
“I must tell you all, children, that you've got a new little sister.”
“A new sister!” screamed Mary.
Helen said: “Oh, Miss Jones!”
Jeremy said: “What did she come for just now, when Mother is ill?”
“God wanted her to come, dear,” said Miss Jones. “You must all be very
kind to her, and do all you can--”
She was interrupted by a torrent of questions from the two girls. What
was she like? What was her name? Could she walk? Where did she come
from? Did Father and Mother find her in Drymouth? And so on. Jeremy was
silent. At last he said: “We don't want any more girls here.”
“Better than having another boy,” said Helen.
But he would not take up the challenge. He sat on his favourite seat
on the window-ledge, dragged up a reluctant Hamlet to sit with him, and
gazed out down into the garden that was misty now in the evening golden
light, the trees and the soil black beneath the gold, the rooks slowly
swinging across the sty above the farther side of the road. Hamlet
wriggled. He always detested that he should be cuddled, and he would
press first with one leg, then with another, against Jeremy's coat; then
he would lie dead for a moment, suddenly springing, with his head up,
in the hope that the surprise would free him; then he would turn into a
snake, twisting his body under Jeremy's arm, and dropping with a flop
on to the floor. All these manoeuvres to-day availed him nothing; Jeremy
held his neck in a vice, and dug his fingers well into the skin. Hamlet
whined, then lay still, and, in the midst of indignant reflections
against the imbecile tyrannies of man, fell, to his own surprise,
asleep.
Jeremy sat there whilst the dusk fell and all the beautiful lights were
drawn from the sky and the rooks went to bed. Rose came to draw the
curtains, and then he left his window-seat, dragged out his toy village
and pretended to play with it. He looked at his sisters. They seemed
quite tranquil. Helen was sewing, and Mary deep in “The Pillars of the
House.” The clock ticked. Hamlet, lost in sleep, snored and sputtered;
the whole world pursued its ordinary way. Only in himself something was
changed; he was unhappy, and he could not account for his unhappiness.
It should have been because his mother was ill, and yet she had been ill
before, and he had been only disturbed for a moment. After all, grown-up
people always got well. There had been Aunt Amy, who had had measles,
and the wife of the Dean, who had had something, and even the Bishop
once... But now he was frightened. There was some perception, coming
to him now for the first time in his life, that this world was not
absolutely stable--that people left it, people came into it, that
there was change and danger and something stronger.... Gradually this
perception was approaching him as though it had been some dark figure
who had entered the house, and now, with muffled step and veiled face,
was slowly climbing the stairs towards him. He only knew that his mother
could not go; she could not go. She was part of his life, and she would
always be so. Why, now, when he thought of it, he could do nothing
without his mother; every day he must tell her what he had done and what
he was going to do, must show her what he had acquired and must explain
to her what he had lost, must go to her when he was hurt and when he was
frightened and when he was glad... And of all these things he had never
even thought until now.
As he sat there the house seemed to grow ever quieter and quieter
about him. He felt as though he would have liked to have gone to the
schoolroom door and listened. It was terrible imagining the house behind
the door--quite silent--so that the clocks had stopped, and no one
walked upon the stairs and no one laughed down in the pantry. He wished
that they would make more noise in the schoolroom. He upset the church
and the orchard and Mrs. Noah.
But the silence after the noise was worse than ever.
Soon Miss Jones took the two girls away to her room to fit on some
clothes, an operation which Helen adored and Mary hated. Jeremy was left
alone, and he was, at once, terribly frightened. He knew that it was of
no use to be frightened, and he tried to go on with his game, putting
the church with the apple trees around it and the Noah family all
sleeping under the trees, but at every moment something compelled him to
raise his head and see that no one was there, and he felt so small and
so lonely that he would like to have hidden under something.
Then when he thought of his mother all alone and the house so quiet
around her and no one able to go to her he felt so miserable that he
turned round from his village and stared desolately into the
fireplace. The thought of his new sister came to him, but was dismissed
impatiently. He did not want a new sister--Mary and Helen were trouble
enough as it was--and he felt, with an old weary air, that it was time,
indeed, that he was off to school. Nothing was the same. Always new
people. Never any peace.
He was startled by the sound of the opening door, and, turning, saw his
father. His father and he were never very easy together. Mr. Cole had
very little time for the individual, being engaged in saving souls in
the mass, and his cheery, good-tempered Christianity had a strange,
startling fashion of proving unavailing before some single human case.
He did not understand children except when they were placed in masses
before him. His own children, having been named, on their arrival,
“Gifts from God,” had kept much of that incorporeal atmosphere
throughout their growing years.
But to-night he was a different man. As he looked at his small son
across the schoolroom floor there was terror in his eyes. Nothing could
have been easier or more simple than his lifelong assumption that,
because God was in His heaven all was right with the world. He had given
thanks every evening for the blessings that he had received and every
morning for the blessings that he was going to receive, and he had had
no reason to complain. He had the wife, the children, the work that he
deserved, and his life had been so hemmed in with security that he
had had no difficulty in assuring his congregation on every possible
occasion that God was good and far-seeing, and that “not one sparrow...”
And now lie was threatened--threatened most desperately. Mrs. Cole was
so ill that it was doubtful whether she would live through the night. He
was completely helpless. He had turned from one side to another, simply
demanding an assurance from someone or something that she could not be
taken from him. No one could give him that assurance. Life without her
would be impossible; he would not know what to do about the simplest
matter. Life without her...oh! but it was incredible!
Like a blind man he had groped his way up to the schoolroom. He did not
want to see the children, nor Miss Jones, but he must be moving, must
be doing something that would break in upon that terrible ominous pause
that the whole world seemed to him, at this moment, to be making.
Then he saw Jeremy. He said:
“Oh! Where's Miss Jones?”
“She's in the next room,” said Jeremy, looking at his father.
“Oh!” He began to walk up and down the schoolroom. Jeremy left his toy
village and stood up.
“Is Mother better, Father?”
He stopped in his walk and looked at the boy as though he were trying to
recollect who he was.
“No... No--that is--No, my boy, I'm afraid not.”
“Is she very bad, Father--like the Dean's wife when she had fever?”
His father didn't answer. He walked to the end of the room, then turned
suddenly as though he had seen something there that terrified him, and
hurried from the room.
Jeremy, suddenly left alone, had a desperate impulse to scream that
someone must come, that he was frightened, that something horrible was
in the house. He stood up, staring at the closed door, his face white,
his eyes large and full of fear. Then he flung himself down by Hamlet
and, taking him by the neck, whispered:
“I'm frightened! I'm frightened! Bark or something!... There's someone
here!”
III
Next morning Mrs. Cole was still alive. There had been no change during
the night; to-day, the doctor said, would be the critical day. To-day
was Sunday, and Mr. Cole took his morning service at his church as
usual. He had been up all night; he looked haggard and pale, still
wearing that expression as of a man lost in a world that he had always
trusted. But he would not fail in his duty. “When two or three are
gathered together in my name....” Perhaps God would hear him.
It was a day of wonderful heat for May. No one had ever remembered so
hot a day at so early a time of year. The windows of the church were
open, but no breeze blew through the aisles. The relentless blazing blue
of the sky penetrated into the cool shadows of the church, and it was as
though the congregation sat there under shimmering glass. The waves of
light shifted, rose and fell above the bonnets and hats and bare heads,
and all the little choir boys fell asleep during the sermon.
The Cole family did not fall asleep. They sat with pale faces and stiff
backs staring at their father and thinking about their mother. Mary
and Helen were frightened; the house was so strange, everyone spoke in
whispers, and, on the way into church, many ladies had asked them how
their mother was.
They felt important as well as sad. But Jeremy did not feel important.
He had not heard the ladies and their questions--he would not have cared
if he had. People had always called him “a queer little boy,” simply
because he was independent and thought more than he spoke. Nevertheless,
he had always in reality been normal enough until now. To-day he was
really “queer,” was conscious for the first time of the existence of a
world whose adjacence to the real world was, in after days, to trouble
him so often and to complicate life for him so grievously. The terror
that had come down upon him when his father had left him seemed to-day
utterly to soak through into the very heart of him. His mother was going
to die unless something or somebody saved her. What was dying? Going
away, he had always been told, with a golden harp, to sing hymns in a
foreign country. But to-day the picture would not form so easily. There
was silence and darkness and confusion about this Death. His mother
was going, against her will, and no one could tell him whither she was
going. If he could only stop her dying, force God to leave her alone, to
leave her with them all as she had been before...
He fixed his eyes upon his father, who climbed slowly into his pulpit
and gave out the text of his sermon. To-day he would talk about the
sacrifice of Isaac. “Abraham, as his hearers would remember...” and so
on.
Jeremy listened, and gradually there grew before his eyes the figure of
a strange and terrible God. This was no new figure. He had never thought
directly about God, but for a very long time now he had had Him in the
background of his life as Polchester Town Hall was in the background.
But now he definitely and actively figured to himself this God, this God
Who was taking his mother away and was intending apparently to put
her into some dark place where she would know nobody. It must be some
horrible place, because his father looked so frightened, which he would
not look if his mother was simply going, with a golden harp, to sing
hymns. Jeremy had always heard that this God was loving and kind and
tender, but the figure whom his father was now drawing for the benefit
of the congregation was none of these things.
Mr. Cole spoke of a God just and terrible, but a God Who apparently
for the merest fancy put His faithful servant to terrible anguish and
distress, and then for another fancy, as light as the first, spared him
his sorrow. Mr. Cole emphasised the necessity for obedience, the need
for a willing surrender of anything that may be dear to us, “because the
love of God must be greater than anything that holds us here on earth.”
But Jeremy did not listen to these remarks; his mind was filled with
this picture of a vast shadowy figure, seated in the sky, his white
beard flowing beneath eyes that frowned from dark rocky eyebrows
out upon people like Jeremy who, although doing their best, were
nevertheless at the mercy of any whim that He might have. This terrible
figure was the author of the hot day, author of the silent house and the
shimmering darkened church, author of the decision to take his mother
away from all that she loved and put her somewhere where she would be
alone and cold and silent--“simply because He wishes...”
“From this beautiful passage,” concluded Mr. Cole, “we learn that God is
just and merciful, but that He demands our obedience. We must be ready
at any instant to give up what we love most and best....”
Afterwards they all trooped out into the splendid sunshine.
IV
There was a horrible Sunday dinner when--the silence and the roast
beef and Yorkshire pudding, and the dining-room quivering with heat,
emphasised every minute of the solemn ticking clock--Mary suddenly burst
into tears, choked over a glass of water, and was led from the room.
Jeremy ate his beef and rice pudding in silence, except that once or
twice in a low, hoarse voice whispered: “Pass the mustard, please,” or
“Pass the salt, please.” Miss Jones, watching his white face and the
tremble of his upper lip, longed to say something to comfort him, but
wisely held her peace.
After dinner Jeremy collected Hamlet and went to the conservatory. This,
like so many other English conservatories, was a desolate and desperate
little place, where boxes of sand, dry corded-looking bulbs, and an
unhappy plant or two languished, forgotten and forlorn. It had been
inherited with the house many years ago, and, at first, the Coles had
had the ambition to make it blaze with colour, to grow there the most
marvellous grapes, the richest tomatoes, and even--although it was
a little out of place in the house of a clergyman of the Church
of England--the most sinister of orchids. Very quickly the little
conservatory had been abandoned; the heating apparatus had failed, the
plants had refused to grow, the tomatoes never appeared, the bulbs would
not burst into colour.
For Jeremy the place had had always an indescribable fascination. When
he was very young there had been absolute trust that things would grow;
that every kind of wonder might spring before one's eyes at any moment
of the day. Then, when no wonder came, there had been the thrill of the
empty boxes of earth; the probing with one's fingers to see what the
funny-looking bulbs would be, and watching the fronds of the pale vine.
Afterwards, there was another fascination--the fascination of some
strange and sinister atmosphere that he was much too young to define.
The place, he knew, was different from the rest of the house. It
projected, conventionally enough, from the drawing-room; but the heavy
door with thick windows of red glass shut it off from the whole world.
Its rather dirty and obscure windows looked over the same country that
Jeremy's bedroom window commanded. It also caught all the sun, so that
in the summer it was terribly hot. But Jeremy loved the heat. He was
discovered once by the scandalised Jampot quite naked dancing on the
wooden boards, his face and hands black with grime. No one could ever
understand “what he saw in the dirty place,” and at one time he had been
forbidden to go there. Then he had cried and stamped and shouted, so
that he had been allowed to return. Amongst the things that he saw there
were the reflections that the outside world made upon the glass; it
would be stained, sometimes, with a strange, green reflection of the
fields beyond the wall; sometimes it would catch the blue of the sky,
or the red and gold of the setting sun; sometimes it would be grey
with waving shadows across its surface, as though one were under water.
Through the dirty windows the country, on fine days, shone like distant
tapestry, and in the glass that covered the farther side of the place
strange reflections were caught: of cows, horses, walls, and trees--as
though in a kind of magic mirror.
Another thing that Jeremy felt there, was that he was in a glass cage
swinging over the whole world. If one shut one's eyes one could easily
fancy that one was swinging out--swinging--swinging, and that, suddenly
perhaps, the cage would be detached from the house and go sailing,
like a magic carpet, to Arabia and Persia, and anywhere you pleased to
command.
To-day the glass burnt like fire, and the green fields came floating
up to be transfigured there like running water. The house was utterly
still; the red glass door shut off the world. Jeremy sat, his arms
tightly round Hamlet's neck, on the dirty floor, a strange mixture of
misery, weariness, fright, and anger. There was already in him a strain
of impatience, so that he could not bear simply to sit down and bewail
something as, for instance, both his sisters were doing at this moment.
He must act. They could not bo happy without their mother; he himself
wanted her so badly that even now, there in the flaming conservatory, if
he had allowed himself to do such a thing, he would have sat and cried
and cried and cried. But he was not going to cry. Mary and Helen could
cry--they were girls; he was going to do something.
As he sat there, getting hotter and hotter, there grew, larger and
larger before his eyes, the figure of Terrible God. That image of
Someone of a vast size sitting in the red-hot sky, his white beard
flowing, his eyes frowning, grew ever more and more awful. Jeremy stared
up into the glass, his eyes blinking, the sweat beginning to pour down
his nose, and yet his body shivering with terror. But he had strung
himself up to meet Him. Somehow he was going to save his mother and
hinder her departure. At an instant, inside him, he was crying: “I want
my mother! I want my mother!” like a little boy who had been left in the
street, and at the other, “You shan't have her! You shan't have her!” as
though someone were trying to steal his Toy-Village or Hamlet away from
him. His sleepy, bemused, heated brain wandered, in dazed fashion, back
to his father's sermon of that morning. Abraham and Isaac! Abraham and
Isaac!
Abraham and Isaac! Suddenly, as though through the flaming glass
something had been flung to him, an idea came. Perhaps God, that huge,
ugly God was teasing the Coles just as once He had teased Abraham.
Perhaps He wished to see whether they were truly obedient as the
Jampot had sometimes wished in the old days. He was only, it might be,
pretending. Perhaps He was demanding that one of them should give up
something--something of great value. Even Jeremy, himself!...
If he had to sacrifice something to save his mother, what would be the
hardest sacrifice? Would it be his Toy-Village, or Mary or Helen, or
his soldiers, or his paint-box, or his gold fish that he had in a bowl,
or--No, of course, he had known from the first what would be hardest--it
would, of course, be Hamlet.
At this stage in his thinking he removed his arm from Hamlet's neck and
looked at the animal. At the same moment the light that had filled the
glass-house with a fiery radiance that burnt to the very heart of the
place was clouded. Above, in the sky, black, smoky clouds, rolling in
fold after fold, as though some demon were flinging them out across the
sky as one flings a carpet, piled up and up, each one darker than the
last. The light vanished; the conservatory was filled with a thick,
murky glow, and far across the fields, from the heart of the black wood,
came the low rumble of thunder. But Jeremy did not hear that; he was
busy with his thoughts. He stared at the dog, who was lying stretched
out on the dirty floor, his nose between his toes. It cannot truthfully
be said that the resolve that was forming in Jeremy's head had its birth
in any fine, noble idealisms. It was as though some bully, seizing his
best marbles, had said: “I'll give you these back if you hand over this
week's pocket-money!” His attitude to the bully could not truthfully be
described as one of homage or reverence; rather was it one of anger and
impotent rebellion.
He loved Hamlet, and he loved his mother more than Hamlet; but he was
not moved by sentiment. Grimly, his legs apart, his eyes shut tight, as
they were when he said his prayers, he made his challenge.
“I'll give you Hamlet if you don't take Mother--” A pause. “Only I can't
cut Hamlet's throat. But I could lose him, if that would do.. . Only
you must take him now--I couldn't do it to-morrow.” His voice began to
tremble. He was frightened. He could feel behind his closed eyes that
the darkness had gathered. The place seemed to be filled with rolling
smoke, and the house was so terribly still!
He said again: “You can take Hamlet. He's my best thing. You can--You
can--”
There followed then, with the promptitude of a most admirably managed
theatrical climax, a peal of thunder that seemed to strike the house
with the iron hand of a giant. Two more came, and then, for a second, a
silence, more deadly than all the earlier havoc.
Jeremy felt that God had leapt upon him. He opened his eyes, turned as
though to run, and then saw, with a freezing check upon the very beat of
his heart, that Hamlet was gone.
V
There was no Hamlet!
In that second of frantic unreasoning terror he received a conviction of
God that no rationalistic training in later years was able to remove.
There was no Hamlet!--only the dusky dirty place with a black
torrent-driven world beyond it. With a rush as of a thousand whips
slashing the air, the rain came down upon the glass. Jeremy turned,
crying “Mother! Mother! I want Mother!” and flung himself at the red
glass doors; fumbling in his terror for the handle, he felt as though
the end of the world had come; such a panic had seized him as only
belongs to the most desperate of nightmares. God had answered him.
Hamlet was gone and in a moment Jeremy himself might be seized...
He felt frantically for the door; he beat upon the glass.
He cried “Mother! Mother! Mother!”
He had found the door, but just as he turned the handle he was aware
of a new sound, heard distantly, through the rain. Looking back he saw,
from behind a rampart of dusty flower-pots, first a head, then a rough
tousled body, then a tail that might be recognised amongst all the tails
of Christendom.
Hamlet (who had trained himself to meet with a fine natural show of
bravery every possible violence save only thunder) crept ashamed, dirty
and smiling towards his master. God had only played His trick--Abraham
and Isaac after all.
Then with a fine sense of victory and defiance Jeremy turned back,
looked up at the slashing rain, gazed out upon the black country, at
last seized Hamlet and dragging him out by his hind-legs, knelt there in
the dust and suffered himself to be licked until his face was as though
a snail had crossed over it.
The thunder passed. Blue pushed up into the grey. A cool air blew
through the world.
Nevertheless, deep in his heart, the terror remained. In that moment he
had met God face to face; he had delivered his first challenge.
P.S.--To the incredulous and cynical of heart authoritative evidence can
be shown to prove that it was on the evening of that Sunday that Mrs.
Cole turned the corner towards recovery.