by Hugh Walpole
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!”
“W
ould 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?”