Hugh Walpole

“ Jeremy himself moved and suddenly the whole cathedral stirred, the mist breaking, steps sounding on the flags, voices echoing. No figure was there—only shadow. But here was that horrid fat man, the precentor, who sometimes came to their house to tea.
“Why, my boy, what are you doing here?” he asked in his big superior voice.
“I came in,” said Jeremy, still staring at the steps of the choir, “just for a moment.”
The precentor put his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “That’s right, my lad,” he said. “Study our great church and all its history. You cannot begin too young. Father well, and mother well?” ”

“ It must have been during one of these moods of the town that Jeremy was caught. He was, as all readers of these reminiscences of his early days will have discovered, a two-sided boy, and he had already a strange, secret interior life within his very healthy and normal exterior one. There is nothing harder, perhaps, in our own experience than to look back and discover when it was that that secret life was as it were first confirmed and strengthened by something in the real world that corresponded to it. ”

“ In vain Uncle Samuel protested that he knew no history and that Saladin was a coloured devil as wicked as sin—Jeremy stuck fast to his ideal—so that at length Uncle Samuel in sheer self-defence was compelled to turn to a subject about which he did know something, namely the history of the town Polchester in which they were living. ”

“ It must have been the devil that led to the adventure of the night raiders (and that is quite another story) ; but again it might have been the old town—nobody knows. How can anybody know thirty years after it was all over and done with?
Until those last three days Jeremy behaved like an angel—that is, he listened to Aunt Amy and washed his hands when she told him to; he did not tease his little sister Barbara, nor hide Helen’s hair ribbons; he allowed Mary to go walking with him and gave Miss Jones a present when she returned from her holiday. ”

“ On this particular afternoon—the first of the last three days of the holidays—he gave Miss Jones and Helen the slip in the market-place. This was to-day easy to do, because it was market-day; he knew that Helen was too deeply concerned with herself and her appearance to care whether he were there or no, and that Miss Jones, delighted as she always was with the shops (knowing them by heart and yet never tired of them!) , would optimistically trust that he would very soon reappear, and at any rate he knew his way home.
He was always delighted with the market on market days. ”

“ Had it not been, Jeremy would surely never have felt the spirit of adventure so strongly, never gone into the old bookshop, never—but you shall hear.
He was very quiet and behaving beautifully during that last week—yes, beautifully, until the last three days when the devil (who is always on the wait for young gentlemen when they are about to return to school) , or the town, or Uncle Samuel or something or somebody suddenly got hold of him and led him the strangest dance. ”

“ He never quite believed in Uncle Samuel and Aunt Amy and Barbara—but in Sir Kenneth and King Richard and Edith and Saladin—how could he not utterly believe?
Saladin! His was the figure that ultimately emerged from the gilded background of the picture. Saladin! He became at once Jeremy’s ideal of everything that was beautiful and “like a man” and brave. He haunted Jeremy’s dreams, he followed him in his walks, came before him as he ate and drank. He must know more about him than “Scott, Bart.,” told you; and once again Uncle Samuel was sought. ”

“ Samuel Porter was that he did not change his prints often enough, being, as any one could see, a man of lazy and indifferent habits; and when Jeremy had seen the same prints for over a year, he naturally knew them by heart. ”

“ With others, two or three occasions can claim to have worked the miracle; with others again that confirmation was gradual, arising out of no definite incident, but rather creeping forward like a finger of the rising sun, slowly lighting one’s path and showing one where to go. ”

“ Winchester! Take off your hat, Jeremy. I’m sure it’s going to snow before I get back. Perhaps Miss Nightingale will be out and I’m sure I shan’t be sorry. You mustn’t say that, Jeremy. There’s only one God.”
“But if there’s only one God——” he began, then broke off at the sight of a dog, strangely like Hamlet. Not so nice though—not nearly so nice.
He was returning to his consideration of the Deity, the Black Bishop and Saladin, when, behold, they were already in the Precincts.
“Now, you’ll be all right, Jeremy dear, won’t you, just for a minute or two? Miss Jones can’t be long.” ”

“ Next to the toy-domain stall was a funny old book-stall. Always hitherto he had passed this; not that it was uninteresting, because the old man who kept the place had colored prints that he stuck, with pins, into the wooden sides of his booth, and these prints were delightful—funny people in old costumes, coaches stuck in the snow, a lady standing on the edge of one toe, or a number of stout men tumbling about the floor after drinking too much. ”

“ His manners, when he liked, could be beautiful, quite as good as Helen’s and much less artificial. If you cared for boys at all—which Aunt Amy must confess that she did not—then Jeremy was the sort of boy to care for. ”

“ God doesn’t mean us to.”
“I don’t believe God could stop the Black Bishop coming back if he wanted to,” said Jeremy.
Aunt Amy would have been terribly shocked had she not seen a most remarkable hat in Forrest’s window that was only thirteen and eleven.
“What did you say, dear? With a little bit of blue at the side. ... Oh, but you mustn’t say that, dear. That’s very wicked. God can do everything.”
“Saladin didn’t believe in God,” said Jeremy, winking at Tommy Winchester who was in charge of his mother on the other side of the street. “At least not in your God, or father’s. His God. ...” ”