by Hugh Walpole
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 ha
d 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.
CHAPTER VIII. TO COW FARM!
I
This next episode in Jeremy’s year has, be it thoroughly understood, no plot nor climax to it — it is simply the chronicle of an Odyssey. Nor can it be said to have been anything but a very ordinary Odyssey to the outside observer who, if he be a parent, will tell you that going to the seaside with the family is the most bothering thing in the world, and if he is a bachelor or old maid will tell you that being in the same carriage with other people’s children who are going to the sea is an abominable business and the Law ought to have something to say to it.