Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  These melancholy thoughts filled Jeremy’s mind when he started upon his walk, but soon he was absorbed by his surroundings. He realised even more drastically than the facts warranted that he was making his farewell to the town.

  He was not making his final farewell; he would not make that until his death, and, perhaps, not then; but he was making farewell to some of his sense of his wonder in it, only not, thank God, to the sense of wonder itself!

  As he went he met the daily figures of all his walks, and he could not help but speculate on their realisation of the great change that was coming to him. It was absurd to suppose that they were saying to themselves: “Ah, there’s young Jeremy Cole! He’s off to school tomorrow. I wonder what he feels about it!...” No, that was incredible, and yet they must realise something of the adventure.

  He, on his part, stared at them with a new interest. They had before shared in the inevitable background without individuality. But now that he was leaving them, and they would grow, as it were, without his permission, he was forced to grant them independence. At the bottom of Orange Street he met Mr. Dawson, the Cathedral Organist; he was a little, plump man, in a very neat grey suit, a shiny top hat, and very small spats. He was always dressed in the same fashion, and carried a black music-case under his arm. He had an eternal interest for Jeremy because, whenever he was mentioned, the phrase was: “Poor little Mr. Dawson!” Why he was to be pitied Jeremy did not know. He looked spruce and bright enough, and generally whistled to himself as he walked; but “poor” was an exciting adjective, and Jeremy, when he passed him, felt a little shudder of drama run down his spine.

  Outside Poole’s bookshop there was, of course, Mr. Mockridge. Mr. Mockridge was the poorest of the Canons; so poor, that it had become a proverb in the place: “As poor as Mr. Mockridge”; and also another proverb, I am afraid, from the same source: “As dirty as Mr. Mockridge.” He was a very long, thin man, with a big, pointing nose, coloured red, not from indigestion, and most certainly not from drink, but simply, I think, because the wind caught it. His passion was for books, and he might be seen every afternoon, between three and four o’clock, bending over Poole’s 2d. box, a dirty handkerchief flying out of the tail of his long, black coat, and a green, bulging umbrella, pointing outwards, under his arm, to the infinite danger of all the passers-by. He was so commonplace a figure to Jeremy that, on ordinary days, he was shrouded by an invisibility of tradition. But, to-day, he was fresh and strange. “He’ll be here to-morrow poking his nose into that box just the same, and I shall be—”

  Then, on the outskirts of the Market Place, Jeremy paused and looked about him. There was all the usual business of the place — the wooden trestles with the flowerpots, the apple-woman under her umbrella, the empty cattle-pens, where the cows and sheep stood on market days, and behind them the dark, vaulted arches of the actual market, now empty and deserted. Bathed in sunlight it lay very quiet and still; some pigeons pecking at grain, a dog or two, and children playing round the empty cattle-stalls. From the hill above the square the Cathedral boomed the hour, and all the pigeons rose in a flight, hovered, then slowly settled again.

  Jeremy sighed, and, with a strange pain at his heart that he could not analyse, moved up the hill. The High Street is, of course, the West End of Polchester, and in the morning, between ten and one, every lady in the town may be seen at her shopping. It had always been the ambition of the Cole children to be taken for their walk up High Street in the morning; but it was an ambition very rarely gratified, because they stopped so often and were always in everyone’s way. And here was Jeremy, at this gay hour, a trolling up the High Street all by himself he lifted his head, pushed out his chest, and looked the world in the face. He might meet the Dean’s Ernest at any moment. The first people whom he saw were the Misses Cragg — always known, of course, as “The Cragg girls.” They were, perhaps, Polchester’s most constant and obvious feature. There were four of them, all as yet unmarried, all with brown-red faces and hard straw hats, short skirts, and tremendous voices; forerunners, in fact, of a type now almost universal. They played croquet and lawn-tennis, were prominent members of the Archery Club, and hunted when their fathers would let them. They were terrible Dianas to Jeremy. He had met one of them once at a Children’s Dance, and she had whirled him around until, with a terrified scream, he broke, howling, from her arms, and hid himself in the large bosom of the Jampot. He was always ashamed of this memory, and he could never see them without blushing; but, to-day, he seemed less afraid of them, and actually, when he passed them, touched his hat and looked them in the face. They all smiled and nodded to him, and when they had gone he was so deeply astonished at this adventure that he had to stop and consider himself. If the Craggs were nothing to him, what might he not face?

  “Come here, Hamlet. How dare you?” he ordered in so sharp and military a voice that Hamlet, who had merely cast a most innocent glance at a disdainful and conceited white poodle, looked up at his master with surprise.

  Nevertheless, his new-found hardihood received, in the very midst of his self-congratulation, its severest test. He stumbled into the very path of the Dean’s wife.

  Mrs. Dean could never have seemed to anyone a large woman, but to Jeremy she had always been a terror. She was thick and hard, like a wall, and wore the kind of silken clothes, that rustled — like the whispering of a whole meeting of frightened clergymen’s wives — as she moved. She had a hard, condemnatory voice, and she spoke as though she were addressing an assembly; but, worst of all, she had black, beetling eyebrows, and these frightened Jeremy into fits. He did not, of course, know that the poor lady suffered continually from nervous headaches. He suddenly heard that voice in his ear: “Good morning, Jeremy, and where are you off to so early?” Mrs. Dean was never so awful as when she was jolly, and Jeremy, caught up by the eyebrows as though they had been hooks and hung thus in mid-air for all the street to laugh at, nearly lost his command of his natural tongue. He found his voice just in time:

  “To Ponting’s,” he said.

  “All alone? Ah, no, I see you have your little dog. Nice little dog. And how’s your mother?”

  “She’s quite well, thank you.”

  “That’s right — that’s right. We haven’t seen you lately. You must come up to tea with your sisters. I’m afraid you won’t find Ernest, he’s gone back to school — but I dare say you’re not too big to play with little girls.”

  Jeremy felt some triumph at his heart.

  “I’m going to school to-morrow,” he said. But if he expected Mrs. Dean to be pitiful at this statement he was greatly mistaken.

  “Are you, indeed? Such a pity you couldn’t have gone with Ernest — but he’d be senior to you, of course... Good-bye. Good-bye. Give my love to your mother,” and she pounded her way along.

  “She’s a beastly woman anyway” thought Jeremy. “I wish I’d found something to say to her. I wonder whether she knows I knocked Ernest down in the summer and trod on him?”

  But the sight of the High Street soon restored his equanimity. On other occasions he had been pushed through it, either by the Jampot or Miss Jones, so rapidly that he could gather only the most fleeting impressions. To-day he could linger and linger; he did. The two nicest shops were Mannings’ the hairdressers and Ponting’s the book-shop, but Rose the grocer’s, and Coulter’s the confectioner’s were very good. Mr. Manning was an artist. He did not simply put a simpering bust with an elaborate head of hair in his window and leave it at that — he did, indeed, place there a smiling lady with a wonderful jewelled comb and a radiant row of teeth, but around this he built up a magnificent world of silver brushes, tortoise-shell combs, essences and perfumes and powders, jars and bottles and boxes. Manning was the finest artist in the town. Ponting, at the top of the street just at the corner of the Close, was an artist too, but in quite another fashion. Ponting was the best established, most sacred and serious bookseller in the county. In the days when the new “Waverley” was the sensation of the mom
ent Mr. Ponting, grandfather of the present Mr. Ponting, had been in quite constant correspondence with Mr. Southey, and Mr. Coleridge, and had once, when on a visit to London, spoken to the great Lord Byron himself. This tradition of aristocracy remained, and the present Mr. Pouting always advised the Bishop what to read and was consulted by Mrs. Lamb, our only authoress, on questions of publishers and editions and such technical points. For all this Jeremy, at his present stage of interest, would have cared nothing even had he known it, but what he did care for were the rows of calf-bound books with little ridges of gold, that made a fine wall across the window with an old print of the Cathedral and the Close in the middle of them. Inside Pontings there was a hush as of the study and the church combined. It was a rather dark shop with rows and rows of books disappearing into the ceiling, and one grave and unnaturally old young man behind the counter. Jeremy did not know what he should do about Hamlet, so he brought him inside, only to discover to his horror that the fiercest of all the Canons, Canon Waterbury, held the floor of the shop. Canon Waterbury had a black beard and a biting tongue. He had once warned Jeremy off the Cathedral grass in a voice of thunder, and Jeremy had never forgotten it. He glared now and pulled his beard, but Hamlet fortunately behaved well, and the old young man discovered Jeremy’s notepaper within a very short period.

  Then suddenly the Canon spoke.

  “Dogs should not be inside shops,” He said, as though he were condemning someone to death.

  “I know,” said Jeremy frankly. “I wanted to tie him up to something and there was nothing to tie him up to.”

  “What did you bring him out for at all?” said the Canon.

  “Because he’s got to have exercise,” said Jeremy, discovering, to his own delighted surprise, that he was not frightened in the least.

  “Oh, has he? I don’t know what people keep dogs for.”

  And then he stamped out of the shop.

  Jeremy regarded this in the light of a victory and marched away, his head more in the air than ever. He should now have hurried home. The midday chimes had rung out and Jeremy’s duties were performed. But he lingered, listening to the last notes of the chimes, hearing the cries of the Cathedral choir-boys as they moved across the green to the choir-school, watching all the people hurry up and down the street. Ah, there was the Castle carriage! Perhaps the old Countess was inside it. He had only seen her once, at some service in the Cathedral to which his mother had taken him, but she had made a great impression on him with her snow-white hair. He had heard people speak of her as “a wicked old woman.” Perhaps she was inside the carriage... but he only saw the Castle coachman and footman and the coronet on the door. It rolled slowly up the hill with its fine air of commanding the whole world — then it disappeared around the corner of the Close.

  Jeremy decided then that he would go home across the green and down Orchard Lane. He had a wish to enter the Cathedral for a moment; such a visit would, after all, complete the round of his experiences. He had never entered the Cathedral alone, and now, as he saw it facing him, so vast and majestic and quiet, across the sun-drenched green, he felt a sudden fear and awe. He found a ring in a stone near the west end through which he might fasten Hamlet’s lead, then, slowly pushing back the heavy door, he passed inside. The Cathedral was utterly quiet. The vast nave, stained with reflections of purple and green and ruby, was vague and unsubstantial, all the little wooden chairs huddled together to the right and left, leaving a great path that swept up to the High Altar under shafts of light that fell like searchlights from the windows. The tombs and the statues peered dimly from the shadow, and the great east end window, with its deep purple light, seemed to draw the whole nave up into its heart and hold it there. All was space and silence, light and dusk; a little doll of a verger moved in the far distance, an old woman, so quiet that she seemed only a shadow, passed him, wiping the little chairs with a duster.

  It seemed to Jeremy that he had never been in the Cathedral before; he stood there, breathless, as though in a moment something must inevitably happen. Although he did not think of it, the moment was one of a sequence that had come to him during the year — his entry into the theatre with his uncle, his first conversation with the sea-captain, the hour when his mother had been so ill, the evening on the beach when Charlotte had been frightened, the time when Hamlet had been lost and he had slept with him under a tree. All these moments had been something more than merely themselves, had had something behind them or inside them for which simply they stood as words stand for pictures. He analysed, of course, nothing, being a perfectly healthy small boy, but if afterwards he looked back these were the moments that he saw as one sees stations on a journey. One day he would know for what they stood.

  He simply now waited there as though he expected something to happen. Thoughts slipped through his mind quite casually, whether Hamlet were behaving well outside, what the old lady did when she was tired of dusting, who the stone figure lying near him might be, a figure very fine with his ruff and his peaked beard, his arms folded, his toes pointing upwards, whether the body were inside the stone like a mummy, or underneath the ground some-where; how strangely different the nave looked now from its Sunday show, and what fun it would be to run races all the way down and see who could reach the golden angels over the reredos first; he felt no reverence, and yet a deep reverence, no fear, but, nevertheless, awe; he was warm and happy and comfortable, and yet suddenly, giving a little shudder, he slipped out into the sunlight, released Hamlet and started for home.

  II

  Back again in the bosom of his family he felt that they were beginning to be aware of his departure.

  “What shall we do this evening, Jeremy — your last evening?” said his mother.

  Everyone looked at him.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “Just as usual, I suppose.”

  “You’re making him feel uncomfortable,” said Aunt Amy, who loved to explain quite obvious things. “You want it to be just an ordinary evening, dear, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said again, hating his aunt.

  “I don’t think that quite the way to speak to your aunt, my son,” said his father. “We only inquire out of kindness, thinking to please you. No, Mary, no more. Friday — one helping—”

  “Jeremy might have another as it’s his last day, I suggest,” said Aunt Amy, who was determined to be pleasant.

  “I don’t want any, thank you,” said Jeremy, although it was treacle pudding, which he loved.

  “Well, I think,” said Mrs. Cole, “that we’ll have high tea at half-past seven, and the children shall stay up afterwards and we’ll have ‘Midshipman Easy.’”

  Jeremy loved his mother intensely at that moment. How did she know so exactly what was right? She made so little disturbance, was so quiet and was never angry, and yet she was always right when the others were always wrong. She knew that above all things he loved high tea — fish pie and boiled eggs and tea and jam and cake — a horrible meal that his later judgment would utterly condemn, but nevertheless something so cosy and so comfortable that no later meal would ever be able to rival it in those qualities.

  “Oh, that will be lovely!” he said, his face shining all over.

  Nevertheless, as the afternoon advanced a strange new sense of insecurity, unhappiness and forlornness crept increasingly upon him. He realised that he had that morning said good-bye to the town, and now he felt as though he had, in some way, hurt or insulted it. And, all the afternoon, he was saying farewell to the house. He did not wander from room to room, but rather sat up in the schoolroom pretending to mend a fishing rod which Mr. Monk had given him that summer. He did not really care about the rod — he was not even thinking of it. He heard all the sounds of the house as he sat there. He could tell all the clocks, that one booming softly the half hours was in his mother’s bedroom, there was a rattle and a whirr and there came the cuckoo-clock on the stairs, there was the fast, cheap careless chatter of the little
clock on the schoolroom mantelpiece, there was the whisper of Miss Jones’s watch which she had put out on the table to mark the time of Mary’s sewing by. There were all the regular sounds of the house. The distant closing of doors, deep down in the heart of the house someone was using a sewing machine somewhere, voices came up out of the void and faded again, someone whistled, someone sang. His gloom increased. He was exchanging a world he knew for a world that he did not know, and he could not escape the feeling that he was, in some way, insulting this world that he was leaving. He bothered himself all the afternoon with unnecessary stupid affairs to cover his deep discomfort. He whistled carelessly and out of tune, he poked the fire and walked about. He was increasingly aware of Hamlet and Mary. Mary was determined so hard that she would show no emotion at all that she was a painful sight to witness. She scarcely spoke to him, and only answered in monosyllables if he asked her something.

  And Hamlet had suddenly discovered that the atmosphere of the house was unusual. He had expected, in the first place, to be taken for a walk that afternoon; then his master was very busy doing nothing, which was most unusual. Then at tea time his worst suspicions were confirmed. Jeremy suddenly made a fuss of him, pouring his tea into his saucer, giving him a piece of bread and jam and an extra lump of sugar. Hamlet drank his tea and ate his bread and jam thoughtfully. They were very nice, but what was the matter?