Hugh Walpole

“ He had, indeed, never realised that grown-up persons had any active histories at all, any histories in the sense in which he and Mary had them. They were all a background, simply a background that blew backwards and forwards like tapestry according to one's need of them. His torture of Miss Jones had been founded on no sort of realisation of her as a human being; she had been a silly old woman, of course, but just as the battered weather-beaten Aunt Sally in the garden was a silly old woman. ”

“ How had Uncle Samuel known that he had deep in his own inside, so deep that he had not mentioned it even to himself, wanted something just like this? Thirty years ago there were none of the presents that there are for children now—no wonderful railways that run round the nursery from Monte Carlo to Paris with all the stations marked; no dolls that are so like fashionable women that you are given a manicure set with them to keep their nails tidy; no miniature motor-cars that run of themselves and go for miles round the floor without being wound up. ”

“ Cole's drawing-room, smiling her brightest, because she so desperately needed the situation, and wearing her best dress. Now she was all in pieces; she had had to leave her little village early in the morning to catch the village bus; she had waited at wayside stations, as in Glebeshire only one can wait; the world had dripped upon her head and spattered upon her legs. She had neuralgia and a pain in her back; she had worn her older dress because, upon such a day, it would not do to travel in her best; and then, as a climax to everything, she had left her umbrella in the train. ”

“ He did not often honour them with his company, despising women most especially when they walked, but to-day his master was busy digging for worms in the vegetable garden, and, after a quarter of an hour's contemplation of this fascinating occupation, he had wandered off in search of a livelier game. He decided to join Miss Jones; he could do what he pleased, he could amuse himself with her ineffectual attempts to keep him in order, and he could irritate Mary; so he danced along, with his tail in the air, barking at imaginary rats and poking his nose into hedges. ”

“ Jeremy recognised him with a strange, little choking sensation. It was “coming home” to him, all this was—the great event of his life, and as he looked at the others he realised, young as he was, that none of them felt it as he did, and the realisation gave him a strange feeling, half of gratification, half of loneliness. He stood there, a little apart from the rest of them, clutching his box, and holding on to Hamlet's lead, feeling so deeply excited that his heart was like a hard, cold stone jumping up and down, bump, bump, behind his waistcoat.
“That's Jim! That's Jim!” ”

“ The clouds raced like the black wings of enormous birds across the light green valley, and the red-gold of the cornfield was tossed into the haze and swept like a golden shadow across the earth, bending back again when the breeze had died. Behind Mellot Wood was Mellot Farm, an old eighteenth-century house about which there was a fine tragic story with a murder and a ghost in it, and this, of course, gave Mellot Wood an additional charm. When they arrived at the outskirts of Mellot Wood Mary looked about her. ”

“ This innocent remark of Mary's conveyed in the tone of it more pleased anticipation than was, perhaps, polite. Certainly the Jampot felt this; a flood of colour rose into her face. Her mouth opened. But what she would have said is uncertain, for at that very moment the drama was further developed by the slow movement of the door, and the revelation of half of Uncle Samuel's body, clothed in its stained blue painting smock, and his ugly fat face clothed in its usual sarcastic smile.
“Excuse me one moment,” he said; “I hear you have a dog.” ”

“ She smiled at him. “There's no reason to be afraid, Mr. Jellybrand. ... He's such a little dog.”
Then the dog smiled at her.
“Poor little thing,” she said. “He must have nearly died in the snow.”
Thus Miss Maple, bitterest of spinsters, influenced, all unwitting, the lives not only of a dog and a curate, but of the entire Cole family, and through them, of endless generations both of dogs and men as yet unborn. Miss Maple, sitting in her little yellow-curtained parlour drinking, in jaundiced contentment, her afternoon's cup of tea, was, of course, unaware of this. ”

“ He had once, years ago, hated a black-faced doll that had been given to him. He had not known why he hated it, but there it had been. He had thrown it out of the window, and the gardener had found it and brought it into the house again, battered and bruised, but still alive, with its horrid red smile, and this had terrified him... He had begun to burn it, and the nurse had caught him and slapped him. He had begun to cut it with scissors, and when the sawdust flowed he was more terrified than ever. But that doll was quite different from Aunt Amy. He was not terrified of her at all. ”

“ Jeremy seemed to himself to be sinking lower and lower into a damp clammy depth of degradation. What must this world be that it could change itself so instantly from a place of gay and happy pleasure into a dim groping room of punishment and dismay?
His feelings were utterly confused. He supposed that he was terribly wicked. But he did not feel wicked. He only felt miserable, sick and defiant. Mary and Helen came in, their eyes open to a crisis, their bodies tuned sympathetically to the atmosphere of sin and crime that they discerned around them. ”

“ Jeremy loved it, and sniffed on this occasion so often that Miss Jones told him to blow his nose. As to the noise, who is there who does not remember that rattle and clatter, that sudden, deafening report as of the firing of a hundred firearms, the sudden pause when every bolt and bar and hinge sighs and moans like the wind or a stormy sea, and then that sudden scream of the clattering windows, when it is as though a frenzied cook, having received notice to leave, was breaking every scrap of china in the kitchen? ”

“ Let them realise something of the agony which Jeremy suffered that day. His whole world had gone.
He was wicked, an outcast; his word could never be trusted again; he would be pointed at, as the boy who had told a lie... And he would not meet Dick Whittington.
The eternity of his punishment hung around his neck like an iron chain. Childhood's tragedies are terrible tragedies, because a child has no sense of time; a moment's dismay is eternal; a careless word from an elder is a lasting judgment; an instant's folly is a lifetime's mistake. ”

“ That Christmas of Jeremy's ninth year was one of the best that he ever had; it was perhaps the last of the MAGICAL Christmases. After this he was to know too much, was to see Father Christmas vanish before a sum in arithmetic, and a stocking change into something that “boys who go to school never have”—the last of the Christmases of divine magic, when the snow fell and the waits sang and the stockings were filled and the turkey fattened and the candles blazed and the holly crackled by the will of God rather than the power of man. ”

“ Impossible to imagine with what life and fire old Miss Henhouse gave this history. You could see with your own eyes the golden ship, the diamond buckles of the Scarlet Admiral, the young man's sad eyes, the parson's black clothes. When she had finished it seemed to Jeremy that it must have been just so. She told him that now on a summer morning or evening the Scarlet Admiral might still be seen, climbing the cliff-path, wiping his sword upon the grass, gazing out with sad eyes to sea. Jeremy swore to himself that on the next occasion of visiting the Cove he would watch... ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life would be very unpleasant now. No tops of eggs, no marmalade on toast, no skins of milk, no stories of “when I was a young girl,” no sitting up five minutes “later,” no stopping in the market-place for a talk with the banana woman—only stern insistence on every detail of daily life; swift judgment were anything left undone or done wrong.
Jeremy sighed; yes, it would be horrid and, for the sake of the world in general, which meant Mary and Helen, he must see what a little diplomacy would do. Kneeling down by the dog, he looked up into her face with the gaze of ingenuous innocence. ”

“ Jeremy asked quickly.
“He does,” answered Uncle Samuel.
Jeremy cast one last look around the place; the merry-go-round was engaged once more upon its wild course, the horses rising and falling, the golden woman clashing the cymbals, the minstrel striking, with his dead eyes fixed upon space, his harp. All about men were shouting; the noise of the coconut stores, of the circus, of the band, of the hucksters and the charlatans, the crying of children, the laughter of women—all the noise of the Fair bathed Jeremy up to his forehead. ”

“ She told herself stories of the times when Jeremy would have to depend entirely upon the splendour of her brains for his delivery from some horror—death, torture or disgrace. At present those times were, she was bound to confess to herself, very distant. He depended upon no one for anything; he could not be said to need Mary's assistance in any particular. And with this burning desire of hers came, of course, jealousy. There are some happy, easy natures to whom jealousy is, through life, unknown. They are to be envied. Jealousy in a grown-up human being is bad; in a child it is terrible. ”

“ There were the influences of the places that we had ourselves seen in our summer holidays—Rafiel and St. Lowe, Marion Bay or Borhaze—and, on the other coast, Newbock with its vast stretch of yellow sand, St. Borse with its wild seas and giant Borse Head, or St. Nails-in-Cove with its coloured rocks and sparkling shells. Every child had his own place; my place was, like Jeremy's, Rafiel, and a better, more beautiful place, in the whole world you will not find. And each place has its own legend: at Rafiel the Gold lured Pirates, and the Turnip-Field ”