by Hugh Walpole
Mary explained, her teeth chattering, her head aching so that she could not see.
“And you shut him up like that? Whatever — Oh, Mary, you wicked girl! And Jeremy — He’s been away two hours now—”
She turned off, leaving Mary alone in the black room.
Mary was left to every terror that can beset a lonely, hysterical child — terror of Jeremy’s fate, terror of Hamlet’s loss, terror of her own crimes, above all, terror of the lonely room, the waving elms and the gathering dark. She could not move; she could not even close the door of the wardrobe, into whose shelter she had again crept. She stared at the white sheet of the window, with its black bars like railings and its ghostly hinting of a moon that would soon be up above the trees. Every noise frightened her, the working of the “separator” in a distant part of the farm, the whistling of some farm-hand out in the yard, the voice of some boy, “coo-ee”-ing faintly, the lingering echo of the vanished day — all these seemed to accuse her, to point fingers at her, to warn her of some awful impending punishment. “Ah! you’re the little girl,” they seemed to say, “who lost Jeremy’s dog and broke Jeremy’s heart.” She was sure that someone was beneath her bed. That old terror haunted her with an almost humorous persistency every night before she went to sleep, but to-night there was a ghastly certainty and imminence about it that froze her blood. She crouched up against the hanging skirts, gazing at the black line between the floor and the white sheets, expecting at every second to see a protruding black mask, bloodshot eyes, a coarse hand. The memory of the burglary that they had had in the spring came upon her with redoubled force. Ah! surely, surely someone was there! She heard a movement, a scraping of a boot upon the floor, the thick hurried breathing of some desperate villain...
Then these fears gave way to something worse than them all, the certainty that Jeremy was dead. Ridiculous pictures passed before her, of Jeremy hanging from a tree, Jeremy lying frozen in the wood, the faithful Hamlet dead at his side, Jeremy stung by an adder and succumbing to his horrible tortures, Jeremy surrounded by violent men, who snatched Hamlet from him, beat him on the head and left him for dead on the ground.
She passed what seemed to her hours of torture under these horrible imaginings, tired out, almost out of her mind with the hysteria of her loneliness, her imagination and her conscience; she passed into a kind of apathy of unhappiness, thinking now only of Jeremy, longing for him, beseeching him to come back, telling the empty moonlit room that she never meant it; that she would do everything he wanted if only he came back to her; that she was a wicked girl; that she would never be wicked again.... And she took her punishment alone.
After endless ages of darkness and terror and misery she heard voices — then HIS voice! She jumped out of the wardrobe and listened. Yes; it WAS his voice. She pushed back the door, crept down the passage, and came suddenly upon a little group, with Jeremy in its midst, crowded together at the top of the stairs. Jeremy was wrapped up in his father’s heavy coat, and looked very small and impish as he peered from out of it. He was greatly excited, his eyes shining, his mouth smiling, his cheeks flushed.
His audience consisted of Helen, Mrs. Cole, Miss Jones, and Aunt Amy. He described to them how he had run along the road “for miles and miles and miles,” how at last he had found the farm, had rung the bell, and inquired, and discovered Hamlet licking up sugary tea in the farm kitchen; there had then been a rapturous meeting, and he had boldly declared that he could find his way home again without aid. “They wanted me to be driven home in their trap, but I wasn’t going to have that. They’d been at the fair all day, and didn’t want to go out again. I could see that.” So he and Hamlet started gaily on their walk home, and then, in some way or another, he took the wrong turn, and suddenly they were in Mellot Wood. “It was dark as anything, you know, although there was going to be a moon. We couldn’t see a thing, and then I got loster and loster. At last we just sat under a tree. There was nothing more to do!” Then, apparently, Jeremy had slept, and had, finally, been found in the proper romantic manner by Jim and his father.
“Well, all’s well that ends well,” said Aunt Amy, with a sniff. In spite of that momentary softness over the defeat of the Dean’s Ernest she liked her young nephew no better than of old. She had desired that he should be punished for this, but as she looked at the melting eyes of Mrs. Cole and Miss Jones she had very little hope.
Mary was forgotten; no one noticed her.
“Bed,” said Mrs. Cole.
“Really, what a terrible affair,” said Miss Jones. “And I can’t help feeling that it was my fault.”
“What Mary—” began Mrs. Cole. And then she stopped. She had perhaps some sense that Mary had already received sufficient punishment.
Mary waited, standing against the passage wall. Jeremy, who had not seen her, vanished into his room. She waited, then plucking up all her courage with the desperate suffocating sense of a prisoner laying himself beneath the guillotine, she knocked timidly on his door.
He said: “Come in,” and entering, she saw him, in his braces, standing on a chair trying to put the picture entitled “Daddy’s Christmas” straight upon its nail. The sight of this familiar task — the picture would never hang straight, although every day Jeremy, who, strangely enough, had an eye to such matters, tried to correct it — cheered her a little.
“Won’t it go straight?” she said feebly.
“No, it won’t,” he began, and then, suddenly realising the whole position, stopped.
“I’m sorry, Jeremy,” she muttered, hanging her head down.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, turning away from her and pulling at the string. “It was a beastly thing to do all the same,” he added.
“Will you forgive me?” she asked.
“Oh, there isn’t any forgiveness about it. Girls are queer, I suppose. I don’t understand them myself. There, that’s better... I say, it was simply beastly under that tree—”
“Was it?”
“Beastly! There was something howling somewhere — a cat or something.”
“You do forgive me, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes... I say, is that right now? Oh, it won’t stay there. It’s the wall or something.”
He came down from the chair yawning.
“Jim’s nice,” he confided to her. “He’s going to take me ratting one day!”
“I’m going,” Mary said again, and waited.
Jeremy coloured, looked as though he would say something, then, in silence, presented a very grimy cheek. “Good-night,” he said, with an air of intense relief.
“Good-night,” she said, kissing him.
She closed the door behind her. She knew that the worst had happened. He had passed away, utterly beyond her company, her world, her interests. She crept along to her room, and there, with a determination and a strength rare in a child so young and so undisciplined, faced her loneliness.
CHAPTER XI. THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
I
The holidays were over. The Coles were once more back in Polchester, and the most exciting period of Jeremy’s life had begun. So at any rate he felt it. It might be that in later years there would be new exciting events, lion-hunting, for instance, or a war, or the tracking of niggers in the heart of Africa — he would be ready for them when they came — but these last weeks before his first departure for school offered him the prospect of the first real independence of his life. There could never be anything quite like that again. Nevertheless, school seemed still a long way distant. It was only his manliness that he was realising and a certain impatience and restlessness that underlay everything that he did.
September and October are often very lovely months in Polchester; autumn seems to come there with a greater warmth and richness than it does elsewhere. Along all the reaches of the Pol, right down to the sea, the leaves of the woods hung with a riotous magnificence that is glorious in its recklessness. The waters of that silent river are so still, so glassy, that the banks of g
old and flaming red are reflected in all their richest colour down into the very heart of the stream, and it is only when a fish jumps or a twig falls from the overhanging trees that the mirror is broken and the colours flash into ripples and shadows of white and grey. The utter silence of all this world makes the Cathedral town sleepy, sluggish, forgotten of all men. As the autumn comes it seems to drowse away into winter to the tune of its Cathedral bells, to the scent of its burning leaves and the soft steps of its Canons and clergy. There is every autumn here a clerical conference, and long before the appointed week begins, and long after it is lawfully concluded, clergymen, strange clergymen with soft black hats, take the town for their own, gaze into Martin the pastry-cook’s, sit in the dusk of the Cathedral listening to the organ; walk, their heads in air, their arms folded behind their backs, straight up Orange Street as though they were scaling Heaven itself; stop little children, pat their heads, and give them pennies; stand outside Poole’s bookshop and delve in the 2d. box for thumb-marked sermons; stand gazing in learned fashion at the great West Door, investigating the saints and apostles portrayed thereon; hurry in their best hats and coats along the Close to some ladies’ tea-party, or pass with solemn and anxious mien into the palace of the Bishop himself.
All these things belong to autumn in Polchester, as Jeremy very well knew, but the event that marks the true beginning of the season, the only way by which you may surely know that summer is over and autumn is come is Pauper’s Fair.
This famous fair has been, from time immemorial, a noted event in Glebeshire life. Even now, when fairs have yielded to cinematographs as attractions for the people, Pauper’s Fair gives its annual excitement. Thirty years ago it was the greatest event of the year in Polchester. All our fine people, of course, disliked it extremely. It disturbed the town for days, the town rocked in the arms of crowds of drunken sailors, the town gave shelter to gipsies and rogues and scoundrels, the town, the decent, amiable, happy town actually for a week or so seemed to invite the world of the blazing fire and the dancing clown. No wonder that our fine people shuddered. Only the other day — I speak now of these modern times — the Bishop tried to stop the whole business. He wrote to the Glebeshire Morning News, urging that Pauper’s Fair, in these days of enlightenment and culture, cannot but be regretted by all those who have the healthy progress of our dear country at heart. Well, you would be amazed at the storm that his protest raised. People wrote from all over the County, and there were ultimately letters from patriotic Glebeshire citizens in New Zealand and South Africa. And in Polchester itself! Everyone — even those who had shuddered most at the fair’s iniquities — was indignant. Give up the fair! One of the few signs left of that jolly Old England whose sentiment is cherished by us, whose fragments nevertheless we so readily stamp upon. No, the fair must remain and will remain, I have no doubt, until the very end of our national chapter.
Nowadays it has shed, very largely, I am afraid, the character that it gloriously maintained thirty years ago. Then it was really an invasion by the seafaring element of the County. All the little country ports and harbours poured out their fishermen and sailors, who came walking, driving, singing, laughing, swearing; they filled the streets, and went peering, like the wildest of ancient Picts, into the mysterious beauties of the Cathedral, and late at night, when the town should have slept, arm in arm they went roaring past the dark windows, singing their songs, stamping their feet, and every once and again ringing a decent door-bell for their amusement. It was very seldom that any harm was done. Once a serious fire broke out amongst the old wooden houses down on the river, and some of them were burnt to the ground, a fate that no one deplored; once a sailor was murdered in a drunken squabble at “The Dog and Pilchard,” the wildest of the riverside hostelries; and once a Canon was caught and stripped and ducked in the waters of the Pol by a mob who resented his gentle appeals that they should try to prefer lemonade to gin; but these were the only three catastrophes in all the history of the fair.
During the fair week the town sniffed of the sea — of lobster and seaweed and tar and brine — and all the tales of the sea that have ever been told by man were told during these days in Polchester.
The decent people kept their doors locked, their children at home, and their valuables in the family safe. No upper class child in Polchester so much as saw the outside of a gipsy van. The Dean’s Ernest was accustomed to boast that he had once been given a ride by a gipsy on a donkey, when his nurse was not looking, but no one credited the story, and the details with which he supported it were feeble and unconvincing. The Polchester children in general were told that “they would be stolen by the gipsies if they weren’t careful,” and, although some of them in extreme moments of rebellion and depression felt that the life of adventure thus offered to them, might, after all, be more agreeable than the dreary realism of their natural days, the warning may be said to have been effective.
No family in Polchester was guarded more carefully in this matter of the Pauper’s Fair than the Cole family. Mr. Cole had an absolute horror of the fair. Sailors and gipsies were to him the sign and seal of utter damnation, and although he tried, as a Christian clergyman, to believe that they deserved pity because of the disadvantages under which they had from the first laboured, he confessed to his intimate friends that he saw very little hope for them either in this world or the next. Jeremy, Helen and Mary were, during Fair Week, kept severely within doors; their exercise had to be taken in the Cole garden, and the farthest that they poked their noses into the town was their visit to St. John’s on Sunday morning. Except on one famous occasion. The Fair Week of Jeremy’s fifth year saw him writhing under a terrible attack of toothache, which became, after two agonised nights, such a torment and distress to the whole household that he had to be conveyed to the house of Mr. Pilter, who had his torture-chamber at No. 3 Market Square. It is true that Jeremy was conveyed thither in a cab, and that his pain and his darkened windows prevented him from seeing very much of the gay world; nevertheless, in spite of the Jampot, who guarded him like a dragon, he caught a glimpse of flags, a gleaming brass band and a Punch and Judy show, and he heard the trumpets and the drum, and the shouts of excited little boys, and the blowing of the Punch and Judy pipes, and he smelt roasting chestnuts, bad tobacco, and beer and gin. He returned, young as he was, and reduced to a corpse-like condition by the rough but kindly intentioned services of Mr. Pilter, with the picture of a hysterical, abandoned world clearly imprinted upon his brain.
“I want to go,” he said to the Jampot.
“You can’t,” said she.
“I will when I’m six,” said he.
“You won’t,” said she.
“I will when I’m seven,” said he.
“You won’t,” said she.
“I will when I’m eight,” he answered.
“Oh, give over, do, Master Jeremy,” said she. And now he was eight, very nearly nine, and going to school in a fortnight. There seemed to be a touch of destiny about his prophecy.
II
He had no intention of disobedience. Had he been once definitely told by someone in authority that he was not to go to the fair he would not have dreamt of going. He had no intention of disobedience — but he had returned from the Cow Farm holiday in a strange condition of mind.
He had found there this summer more freedom than he had been ever allowed in his life before, and it had been freedom that had come, not so much from any change of rules, but rather from his own attitude to the family — simply he had wanted to do certain things, and he had done them and the family had stood aside. He began to be aware that he had only to push and things gave way — a dangerous knowledge, and its coming marks a period in one’s life.
He seemed, too, during this summer, to have left his sisters definitely behind him and to stand much more alone than he had done before. The only person in his world whom he felt that he would like to know better was Uncle Samuel, and that argued, on his part, a certain tendency towards rebellio
n and individuality. He was no longer rude to Aunt ‘Amy, although he hated her just as he had always done. She did not seem any longer a question that mattered. His attitude to his whole family now was independent.
Indeed, he was, in reality, now beginning to live his independent life. He was perhaps very young to be sent off to school by himself, although in those days for a boy of eight to be plunged without any help but a friendly word of warning into the stormy seas of private school life was common enough — nevertheless, his father, conscious that the child’s life had been hitherto spent almost entirely among women, sent him every morning during these last weeks at home down to the Curate of St. Martin’s-in-the-Market to learn a few words of Latin, an easy sum or two, and the rudiments of spelling. This young curate, the Rev. Wilfred Somerset, recently of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had but two ideas in his head — the noble game of cricket and the jolly qualities of Mr. Surtees’s novels. He was stout and strong, red-faced, and thick in the leg, always smoking a largo black-looking pipe, and wearing trousers very short and tight. He did not strike Jeremy with fear, but he was, nevertheless, an influence. Jeremy, apparently, amused him intensely. He would roar with laughter at nothing at all, smack his thigh and shout, “Good for you, young ‘un,” whatever that might mean, and Jeremy, gazing at him, at his pipe and his trousers, liking him rather, but not sufficiently in awe to be really impressed, would ask him questions that seemed to him perfectly simple and natural, but that, nevertheless, amused the Rev. Wilfred so fundamentally that he was unable to give them an intelligible answer.
Undoubtedly this encouraged Jeremy’s independence.
He walked to and fro the curate’s lodging by himself, and was able to observe many interesting things on the way. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, he would have some lesson that he must take to his master who, as he lodged at the bottom of Orange Street, was a very safe and steady distance from the Coles.
Of course Aunt Amy objected.