Hugh Walpole

“ Jeremy wriggled himself free. Suddenly he said hotly: “Father’s as good as you, every bit as good. Even though you have been everywhere and he hasn’t. People like father awfully in Polchester, and they say his sermons are better than anybody’s. Father’s just as good as you are—— I——” and then suddenly burst from the room.
Uncle Percy stood there. This may be said to have been the greatest shock of his life. The boy’s father? What was he talking about? The boy’s father? As good as he was? The boy hated him so much that he wouldn’t even take the money. ”

“ Our colonies promote a directer form of contact between individuals than is our custom at home; it is a true word that there are no “frills” in the colonies. You let a man know what you think of him for good or ill without any disguise. Uncle Percy let his brother know what he thought of him at once, and he let every one else know too—and this was, for his brother, a very painful experience.
The Rev. Herbert Cole had been brought up in seclusion. ”

“ Mr. Cole had not seen his brother for twenty years. They had received one photograph of a large fat staring man on a large fat staring horse. Such thighs, such a back, both of man and of horse! “Feed their animals well in New Zealand” was Uncle Samuel’s only comment, and he, back only that minute from painting the moors, departed at a moment’s notice for London.
“Don’t you want to see Uncle Percy?” asked Jeremy. ”

“ Cole, looking a little distressed. “He’s a funny child. He’s always making his own plans.”
“Obstinate. That’s what I call it,” said Uncle Percy. “Damned obstinate.” He went out that morning alone. He thought that he would buy something for the kid, something really rich and impressive. It could not be that the boy disliked him, and yet ... All that morning he was haunted by the boy’s presence. Going to school to-morrow, was he? Not much time left for making an impression. He could not find anything that morning that would precisely do. Rotten shops, the Polchester ones. ”

“ For those twenty-four hours he admired it all immensely—the unceasing flow of words, the knowledge of every imaginable quarter of the globe, the confident, unfaltering answer to every possible question, the definite assumption of universal superiority, the absence of every doubt, hesitation or shyness. ”

“ Why, he hasn’t been anywhere in England—not even to Drymouth.”
“No, my boy, he hasn’t. You see, when people have lived in the colonies all their lives they get a little—ahem—out of touch.”
“Yes, father.”
Delightful to think of Uncle Percy being out of touch. Quite a savage, a barbarian. Father and son laughed a little together.
“I bet the boys at Thompson’s would laugh at him,” said Jeremy, “like anything.”
“One has to be polite,” said Mr. Cole. “After all, he is our guest. Don’t forget that, my boy.” ”

“ I say that he was unconscious of what he was doing; and so in a fashion was the Cole family unconscious. That is, Mrs. Cole and Aunt Amy and the children realised that Uncle Percy was being rude, but they did not realise that the work of years was, in a few days, being completely undone. So used to custom and tradition are we that in our daily life we will accept almost any figure in the condition in which we receive it and then proceed to add our own little “story” to the structure already presented to us.
Mrs. Cole did not wish, Aunt Amy even did not wish, to see their Herbert “a fool” ”

“ He stared at her with all his eyes. “Why, you’re a beauty, ’pon my soul, you are! Come and sit here beside your old uncle and tell him how all the boys run after you. I’m sure they do if boys are still the same as when I was young. ”

“ Cole was going to teach the little girls their Catechism. They parted, and Jeremy ran all the way down the hill home.
IV
Uncle Percy loved the world and desired that, in natural return, the world should love him. It seemed to him that the world did so. Once and again the net of his jollity and fun seemed to miss some straggling fish who gaped and then swam away, but he was of that happy temperament thus described by one of the most lovable of our modern poets:
“Who bears in mind misfortunes gone,
Must live in fear of more ”