by Hugh Walpole
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.”