Jeremy

“ Master Jeremy, being full of London and Norwich experience, fell into the error of supposing that we clods and yokels were the simplest of the simple, and could be cheated at his good pleasure. Now this is not so: when once we suspect that people have that idea of us, we indulge them in it to the top of their bent, and grieve that they should come out of it, as they do at last in amazement, with less money than before, and the laugh now set against them. ”

“ Jeremy began to laugh—everyone laughed; the strange voice came again and again, lamenting, bewailing, she had secured one bale, a smile of cautious triumph began to spread over her ugly face, then the bales all fell again, and once more she was on her knees. It was then that her voice or some movement brought to Jeremy's eyes so vividly the figure of their old gardener, Jordan, that he turned round to Uncle Samuel, and suddenly grasping that gentleman's fat thigh, exclaimed convulsively: “Why, she's a man!” ”

“ Jeremy knew that he was trying to come close to him and be a friend of a new kind to him.
He heard in a distance such words as: “... a new world, full of trial and temptation. God sees us... Work at your Latin... cricket and football... prayers every night...” But he could feel no emotion nothing but terror lest some sudden stupid emotional scene should occur. Nothing occurred. He kissed his father and went.
Then, quite suddenly, just as he came down in his hat and coat and heard that the cab was there, his restraint melted; he was free and impulsive and natural. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just about Jeremy's height and build—rather tall and thin that is—with a slight stoop forward from the shoulders due to thoughtfulness and camel-riding and a genuine intention not to hold his head too high, he looked like a shepherd in a Bible picture, only with good humour added, that brought him forward out of a world of dreams on to the same plane with you, face to face—understanding meeting understanding—man to man. ”

“ Jeremy sat, his arms tightly round Hamlet's neck, on the dirty floor, a strange mixture of misery, weariness, fright, and anger. There was already in him a strain of impatience, so that he could not bear simply to sit down and bewail something as, for instance, both his sisters were doing at this moment. He must act. They could not bo happy without their mother; he himself wanted her so badly that even now, there in the flaming conservatory, if he had allowed himself to do such a thing, he would have sat and cried and cried and cried. ”

“ Jeremy's sense of newly received power reached its climax when they walked round the Close and reached the back of the Cathedral. I know that now, both for Jeremy and me, that prospect has dwindled into its proper grown-up proportions, but how can a man, be he come to threescore and ten and more, ever forget the size, the splendour, the stupendous extravagance of that early vision? ”

“ Behind him was the cloudy smoke of the apple-scent; in front of him the sun was sinking towards the dark elms. Soon the trees would catch the sun and hide it; the galleon cloud that had been over them as they drove was new banked in red and gold across the horizon; birds slowly, lazily fled to their homes.
He heard someone call, “Jeremy! Jeremy!” With a last gaze he saw the blue cup turn to gold, the sun reached the tops of the elms; the fields were lit with the glitter of shining glass, then, even as he watched, they were purple, then grey, then dim like smoke. ”

“ Mrs. Cole had told her that Jeremy was “getting too much” for his nurse; she approached Jeremy with exactly the tremors and quaking boldness that she would have summoned to her aid before a bull loose in a field. She really did look frightening with her large spectacles on the end of her large nose, her mouth firmly set, and a ruler in her hand. “I insist on absolute obedience,” was her motto. Jeremy looked at her but said no word. It was made clear to them all that the new regime was to be far other than the earlier nursery one. ”

“ He told Jeremy the most marvellous stories, and Jeremy believed every word of them. They sat on a little hummock, with a dark wood behind them, and watched the moon rise.
“You’re a decent kid,” said Humphrey. “I like you better than my brothers. I suppose you’ll forget me as soon as I’m gone.”
“I’ll never forget you,” said Jeremy. “Can’t you leave your family and be somebody else? Then you can come and stay with us.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ He seemed in his rough grey overcoat too huge to be human, and when this was taken from him by the smiling Emily—she always smiled, as Jeremy had long since observed, at gentlemen more than at ladies—in his bright brown tweeds he was still huge, and, with his brown hair and red face, like a solid chunk of sunset thrown into the dark house to cheer it up. He went bursting up the staircase, and the children fled—only just in time.
From the schoolroom they heard him erupt into the drawing-room, and then the bumping of his box up the stairs and the swearing of the cabman. ”

“ She was rather flattered, and when it was discovered that Miss Jones and Helen were also going that way and could pick Jeremy up and bring him home, she agreed to the plan. Jeremy and she were old, old enemies; he had insulted her again and again, played jokes upon her, had terrible storms of temper with her; but once, when a wretched little boy had laughed at her, he had fought the little boy and she had never forgotten that. As he grew older something unregenerate in her insisted on admiring him; he was such a thorough boy, so sturdy and manly. ”

“ He was, however, it seemed, a child with a considerable sense of humour, because he suddenly pinched Jeremy in the fatty part of his thigh, and then looked at him very severely as though challenging him to say anything about it, and it suddenly occurred to Jeremy that you had a great advantage if you looked old and solemn, because no one would ever believe anything wicked of you. ”

“ She looked up and suddenly realised that it was truly Jeremy. “You're only a little boy, but you know very well that I can't manage you. And then where am I to go to? No one will take me after I've been such a failure.”
The colour stole into his cheeks. He was immensely proud. No grown-up person had ever before spoken to him as though he was himself a grown-up person—always laughing at him like Uncle Samuel, or talking down to him like Aunt Amy, or despising him like Mr. Jellybrand. But Miss Jones appealed to him simply as one grown-up to another. ”

“ The best times are always the old times. The huge lady in the seat next to Jeremy almost swallowed him up, so that he peered out from under her thick arm, and heard every crunch and crackle of the peppermints that she was enjoying. He grew hotter and hotter, so that at last he seemed, as once he had read in some warning tract about a greedy boy that Aunt Amy had given him, “to swim in his own fat.” ”

“ Jeremy moved across the carpet slowly; he was deeply embarrassed, conscious of the solemn gaze of Aunt Amy, of Helen and Mary. A great red hand fell upon his shoulder. He felt himself suddenly caught up by the slack of his pants, held in mid-air, then dropped, cascades of laughter billowing meanwhile around him.
“That’s a fine boy, hey? That’s what we do to boys in New Zealand to make ’em grow. Want to grow, hey? Be a bigger man than your father, ho? Well, that won’t be difficult, anyway. Never were much of a size, were you, Herbert? Well, boy, go to school?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am as I was. I ask charity of no man. I know what is due to me.”
It was this that attracted Jeremy; he had himself felt thus after a slippering from his father, or idiotic punishments from the Jampot, and the uninvited consolations of Mary or Helen upon such occasions had been resented with so fierce a bitterness that his reputation for sulkiness had been soundly established with all his circle. ”

“ Jeremy, meanwhile, was occupied now with the thought as to what he would do did the Captain really want him to go away with him. He discussed it with himself, but he did not doubt what he would do; he would go. And he would go, he knew, with fear and dread, and with a longing to stay, and be warm in the schoolroom, and have jam for tea, and half an hour before bedtime downstairs, and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ The Cole children hated him. Jeremy because he had damp hands, Helen because he never looked at her, Mary because he once said to her, “Little girls must play as well as work, you know.” He always talked down to us as though we were beings of another and inferior planet. ”

“ In an hour Jeremy threw his whole ideal of life to the winds, and decided for wealth and mundane fame—speedy wealth and speedy mundane fame (speed was essential, because Jeremy's feelings were in a hurry) . Such laurels and fruits were not to be plucked in Milldean. That very night Jeremy packed a well-worn leather bag and a square deal box. He was going to London, to see Grantley and Sibylla, to make them acquainted with the state of the case, and to set about becoming rich and famous as speedily as possible. ”

“ Don't talk so much. You know I hate you children chattering. Always got something to say.”
So Jeremy was silent. They raced down Orange Street, Jeremy being almost carried off his feet. This was exactly like a dream. This rushing movement and the way that the lamp-posts ran up to you as though they were going to knock you down, and the way that the stars crackled and sputtered and trembled overhead. But Uncle Samuel's hand was flesh and blood, and the heel of Jeremy's right shoe hurt him and he felt the tickle of his sailor-collar at the back of his neck, just as he did when he was awake. ”

“ The children exchanged a glance of realisation. Jeremy smiled. The lesson was continued. What possessed Jeremy now? What possesses any child, naturally perhaps, of a kindly and even sentimental nature at the sight of something helpless and in its power? Is there any cruelty in after life like the cruelty of a small boy, and is there anything more powerful, more unreasoning, and more malicious than the calculating tortures that small children devise for those weaker than themselves? Jeremy was possessed with a new power. ”

“ There was a field on their right, with a break in the hedge; through the break she saw buttercups, thousands of them, and loosestrife and snapdragons. She climbed the gate and vanished into the field. Jeremy walked on, scarcely realizing her absence. Suddenly he heard a scream; he stopped, and Hamlet stopped, pricking up his ears. Another scream, then a succession, piercing and terrible; then over the field-gate Mary appeared, tumbling over regardless of all beholders and proprieties, then running, crying, "Jeremy! Jeremy! Jeremy!" buttercups scattering from her hand as she ran. ”

“ But before it could happen I was suddenly brought to my senses by the fortissimo e prestissimo of Jeremy's conclusion. "He cannot be saved," he roared out, banging his prayer-book down on the book-rest, with a defiant look around him, as though the whole Liberal Party were in church. "He cannot be saved,"—and visions of all sorts of people boiling in coppers filled the mental eye.
Jeremy, for a farmer, was the most outrageous optimist I have ever met. He never grumbled, save at politicians, and the worst weather could hardly disconcert him. ”