Jeremy and Hamlet/Chapter 12

T was a fine day. Jeremy, waking and turning over in his bed, could see beyond and above Stokesley’s slumbering form a thin strip of pale blue sky gleaming like a sudden revelation of water behind folds of amber mist. It would be a real thumping autumn day and he was to play half for the first fifteen against The Rest that afternoon. He also had three hundred lines to do for the French master that he had not even begun, and it must be handed up completed at exactly 11.30 that same morning. He had also every chance of swapping a silver frame containing a photograph of his Aunt Amy with Phipps minor for a silver pencil, and he was to have half Raseley’s sausage for breakfast that morning in return for mathematical favours done for him on the preceding day. As he thought of all these various things he rolled round like a kitten in his bed, curling up as it was his pleasantest habit into a ball so that his toes nearly met his forehead and he was one exquisite lump of warmth. Rending through this came the harsh sound of the first bell, murmurs from other rooms, patterings down the passage, and then suddenly both Stokesley and Raikes sitting up in bed simultaneously, yawning and looking like bewildered owls. In precisely five minutes the three boys were washed, dressed and down, herding with the rest in the long cold class-room waiting for Call-Over. When they had answered their names they slipped across the misty playground into chapel and sat there like all their companions in a confused state of half sleep, half wakefulness, responding as it were in a dream, screaming out the hymn and then all shuffling off to breakfast again like shadows in a Japanese pageant.

It was not, in fact, until the first five minutes at breakfast, when Raseley strongly resisted the appeal for half his sausage, that Jeremy woke to the full labours of the day. Raseley was sitting almost opposite to him and he had a very nice sausage, large and fat and properly cracked in the middle. Jeremy’s sausage was a very small one, so that, whereas on other days he might have passed over the whole episode, being of a very generous nature, to-day he was compelled to insist on his rights. “I didn’t,” protested Raseley. “I said you could have half a sausage if you did the sums, and you only did two and a half.”

“I did them all,” said Jeremy stoutly. “It wasn’t my fault that that beastly fraction one was wrong. I only said I’d do them. I never said I’d do them right.”

“Well, you can jolly well come and fetch it,” said Raseley, pursuing in the circumstances the wisest plan, which was to eat his sausage as fast as he could.

“All right,” said Jeremy indifferently. “You know what you’ll get afterwards if you don’t do what you said,” and this was bold of Jeremy because he was smaller than Raseley, but he was learning already whom he might threaten and whom he might not, and he knew that Raseley was as terrified of physical pain as Aunt Amy was of a cow in a field. With very bad grace Raseley pushed the smaller half of the sausage across, and Jeremy felt that his day was well begun.

He did not know why, but he was sure that this would be a splendid day. There are days when you feel that you are under a special care of the gods and that they are arranging everything for you, background, incident, crisis, and sleep at the end in a most delightful, generous fashion. Nothing would go wrong to-day.

On the whole, human beings are divided into the two classes of those who realise when they may step out and challenge life, and those to whom one occasion is very much the same as another.

Jeremy, even when he was eight years old and had sat in his sister Helen’s chair on his birthday morning, had always realised when to step out. He was going to step out now.

The insufferable Baltimore, who was a wonderful cricketer and therefore rose to great glories in the summer term, but was no footballer at all, and equally, therefore, was less than the dust in the autumn, came with his watery eyes and froggy complexion to ask Jeremy to lend him twopence. Jeremy had at that moment threepence, but there were a number of things that he intended to do with it. Because he detested Baltimore he lent him his twopence with the air of Queen Elizabeth accepting Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak, and got exquisite pleasure from doing so. All these little things, therefore, combined to put him in the best of spirits when, at half-past eleven, Monsieur Clemenceau (not then a name known the wide world over) requested Monsieur Cole to be kind enough to allow him to peruse the three hundred lines which should have been done several days before so admirably provided by him.

Jeremy wore the cloak of innocence, sitting in the back row of the French class with several of his dearest friends and all the class ready to support him in any direction that he might follow.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Jeremy said. “Did you say three hundred lines?”

“That is the exact amount,” said M. Clemenceau, “that I require from you immediatement.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Jeremy politely.

“I need not repeat,” said M. Clemenceau. “Three hundred lines by you at once for impertinence three days previous.”

“Why, sir, surely,” said Jeremy, “you told me that I need not do them this term because …”

“No because,” interrupted M. Clemenceau at the top of a rather squeaky voice. “There is no because.”

“But, sir,” began Jeremy; and from all sides of the class there broke out: “Why, certainly, sir, don’t you remember” and “Cole is quite right, sir; you said” and “I think you’ve forgotten, sir, that” and “It really wouldn’t be fair, sir, if” A babel arose. As the boys very well knew, M. Clemenceau had a horror of too much noise, because Thompson was holding a class in the next room, and on two occasions that very term had sent a boy in to request that if it were possible M. Clemenceau should conduct his work a little more softly. And this had been agony for M. Clemenceau’s proud French spirit. “I will have silence,” he shrieked. “This is no one’s business but mine and the young Cole. Let no one speak until I tell them to do so. Now, Cole, where are the three hundred lines?”

There was a complete and absolute silence.

“Vill you speak or vill you not speak?” M. Clemenceau cried.

“Do you mean me, sir?” asked Jeremy very innocently.

“Of course, I mean you.”

“You said, sir, that no one was to speak until you told them to.”

“Well, I tell you now.”

Jeremy looked very injured. “I didn’t understand,” he said. “If I could explain to you quietly.”

“Well, you shall explain afterwards,” said M. Clemenceau, and Jeremy knew that he was saved because he could deal à deux with M. Clemenceau by appealing to his French heart, his sense of honour, and a number of other things, and might even, with good fortune, extract an invitation to tea, when M. Clemenceau, in his very cosy room, had a large supply of muffins and played on the flute. “Yes,” he thought to himself as they pursued up and down the class-room, sometimes ten at a time, sometimes only three or four, the intricacies of that French grammar that has to do with the pen of my aunt and the cat of my sister-in-law and “this is going to be a splendid day.”

Coming out of school at half-past twelve, he found to his exquisite delight that there was a letter for him. He was, of course, far from that grown-up attitude of terror and misgiving at the sight of the daily post. Not for him yet were bills and unwelcome reminiscence, broken promises and half-veiled threats. He received from his mother one letter a week, from his father perhaps three a term, and from his sister Mary an occasional confused scribbling that, like her stories, introduced so many characters one after another that the most you obtained from them was a sense of life and of people passing and of Mary’s warm and emotional heart. Once and again he had a letter from Uncle Samuel, and these were the real glories. It was natural that on this day of days there should be such a letter. The very sight of his uncle’s handwriting—a thin, spidery one that was in some mysterious way charged with beauty and colour—cockled his heart and made him warm all over. He sat in a corner of the playground where he was least likely to be disturbed and read it. It was as follows. It began abruptly, as did all Uncle Samuel’s letters:

He read the letter through three times before finishing with it; then, sitting forward on the old wooden bench scarred with a thousand penknives, he went over the delicious details of it. How exactly Uncle Samuel realised the things that he would want to know! No one else in the family wrote about anything that was exciting or intriguing. Uncle Samuel managed in some way to make you see things. The studio, the sky with the little moon, the red apples, Hamlet flat on the floor, his head rigid, his eyes fixed; Aunt Amy shopping in Drymouth, Barbara tumbling downstairs. That whole world came towards him and filled the playground and blotted out the school, so that for a moment school life was unreal, shadowy, and did not matter. He sighed with happy contentment. Young though he was, he realised that great truth that one person in the world is quite enough. One human being who understands your strange mixture equalises five million who think you are simply black, white or purple. All you want is to be reassured about your own suspicions of yourself. A devoted dog is almost enough, and one friend ample. Jeremy went in to dinner with his head in the air, trailing after him, like Peter Pan, one shadow in the world immediately around him, the world in which the school sergeant was carving the mutton at the end of the table so ferociously that it might have been the corpse of his dearest enemy, and the masters at the high table were getting fried potatoes and the boys only boiled, and Jeremy was not having even those because he had got to play football in an hour’s time; and the other world, where there was Aunt Amy’s eyelash high in the air, and the cathedral bells ringing, and Uncle Samuel painting cows. Jeremy would have liked to consider the strange way in which these two worlds refused to mingle, to have developed the idea of Uncle Samuel carving the mutton instead of the sergeant, and the sergeant watching the evening sky instead of Uncle Samuel, and why it was that these two things were so impossible! His attention was occupied by the fact that Plummy Smith, who was a fat boy, was sitting in the wrong place and making a “squash” on Jeremy’s side of the table, which led quite naturally to the game of trying to squeeze Plummy from both ends of the table into a purple mass, and to do it without Thompson noticing. Little pathetic squeals came from Plummy, who loved his food, and saw his mutton mysteriously whisked away on to some other plate, and knew that he would be hungry all the afternoon in consequence. He was one of those boys who had on the first day of his arrival, a year earlier, unfortunately confided to those whom he thought his friends that he lived with two aunts, Maria and Alice. His fate was sealed from the moment of that unfortunate confidence. He did not know it, and he had been in puzzled bewilderment ever since as to why the way of life was made so hard for him. He meant no one any harm, and could not understand why the lower half of his person should be a constant receptacle for pins of the sharpest kind. The point in this matter about Jeremy was that, as with Miss Jones years before, he could not resist pleasant fun at the expense of the foolish. He had enough of the wild animal in him to enjoy sticking pins into Plummy, to enjoy squeezing the breath out of his fat body, to enjoy seeing him without any mutton; and yet, had it been really brought home to him that Plummy was a miserable boy, sick for his aunts, dazed and puzzled, spending his days in an orgy of ink, impositions and physical pain, he would have been horrified that himself could be such a cad. He was not a cad. It was a fine day, he was in splendid health and spirits, he had had a letter from Uncle Samuel, and so he stuck pins into Plummy.

When the meal was over he walked down to the football ground with Riley, and told him about Uncle Samuel. He told Riley everything, and Riley told him everything. He never considered Riley as an individual human being, but rather as part of himself, so that if he were kicked in the leg it must hurt Riley too; and there was something in Riley’s funny freckled forehead, his large mouth, and his funny, clumsy way of walking, as though he were a baby elephant, that was as necessary to Jeremy and his daily life as putting on his clothes and going to sleep. He showed Riley the piece of paper that Uncle Samuel had sent to him. “By gosh!” said Riley, “that’s a pound.”

“It’s an awful pity,” said Jeremy, “that you are not in Little Dorm. Perhaps you could come in to-night. I’m sure Stokesley and Pug wouldn’t mind. We’re going to have sardines and marmalade and doughnuts.”

“If I get a chance, I will,” said Riley; “but I don’t want to be caught out just now, because I’ve been in two rows already this week. Perhaps you could keep two sardines for me, and I’ll have them at breakfast to-morrow.”

“All right; I’ll try,” said Jeremy. He looked about and sniffed the air. It was an ideal day for football. It was cold, and not too cold. The hills above the football field were veiled in mist. The ground was soft, but not too soft. It ought to be a good game.

“Do you feel all right?” asked Riley.

They proceeded in the accustomed manner to test this. Jeremy hurled himself at Riley, caught him round the middle, tried to twine his legs round Riley’s, and they both fell to the ground. They rolled there like two puppies. Jeremy exerted all his strength to bring off what he had never yet succeeded in doing, namely, to turn Riley over and pin his elbows to the ground. Riley wriggled like a fish. Jeremy was very strong to-day, and managed to get one elbow down and was in a very good way towards the other when they heard an awful voice above them. “And what may this be?” They scrambled to their feet, flushed and breathless, and there was old Thompson staring at them very gravely in that way that he had so that you could not tell whether he were displeased or no.

“We were only wrestling, sir,” said Jeremy, panting.

“Excellent thing for your clothes,” said Thompson. “What do you suppose the gym is for?”

“It was only a minute, sir,” said Riley. “Cole wanted to see whether he was all right.”

“And he is?” asked Thompson.

Jeremy perceived that Olympus was smiling.

“I’m a little out of breath,” he said, “but of course it’s just after dinner. The ground isn’t muddy yet.”

“You’d better wait until you’re in football things,” Thompson said, “then you can roll about as much as you like.”

He walked away, rolling a little as he went. The two boys looked after him and suddenly adored him. Their feelings about him were always undergoing lightning changes. At one moment they adored, at another they detested, at another they admired from a distance, and at another they wondered.

“Wasn’t that decent of him?” said Riley.

“That’s because he’s just had his dinner,” said Jeremy. “It’s his glass of beer. My uncle’s just the same.”

“Oh, you and your uncle,” said Riley. “I’ll race you to the end of the playground.”

They ran like hares, and Jeremy led by a second.

He was in the changing-room when suddenly the atmosphere of the coming game was close about him. He had that strange mixture of fear and excitement, terror and pleasure. He suddenly felt cold in his jersey and shorts, and shivered a little. At the other side of the room was Turnbull, one of the three-quarters playing for the “Rest,” a large, bony boy with projecting knees. The mere thought that he would have in all probability to collar Turnbull and bring him to the ground made Jeremy feel sick. His confidence suddenly deserted him. He knew that he was going to play badly. Worse than ever in his life before. He wished that he could suddenly develop scarlet fever and be carried off to the infirmary. He even searched his bare legs for spots. He had rather a headache and his throat felt queer, and he was not at all sure that he could see straight. One of those silly fools who always comes and talks to you at the wrong moment sniggered and said he felt awfully fit. It was all right for him; he was one of the forwards playing for the “Rest.” It would be perfectly easy for him to hide himself in the scrum and pretend to be pushing when he was not. No one ever noticed. But the isolation of a half was an awful thing to consider, and that desperate moment when you had to go down to the ball, with at least five hundred enormous boots all coming at your head at the same moment, was horrible to contemplate. Millett, the scrum half playing for the “Rest,” and Jeremy’s bitterest rival for the place in the fifteen, was looking supremely self-confident and assured. Certainly he was not as good as Jeremy on Jeremy’s day, but was this Jeremy’s day? No, most certainly it was not.

They went out to the field, and everything was not improved by the fact that a large crowd was gathered behind the ropes to watch them. This was an important game. The big school match was a fortnight from to-day, and Millett might get his colours on to-day’s game quite easily. And then suddenly the feel of the turf under his feet, the long, sweeping distance of the good grey sky above his head, the tang of autumn in the air, brought him confidence again. He was not aware that a lady visitor who had come out with Mr. Thompson to watch the game was saying at that moment, “Why, what a tiny boy! You don’t mean to say, Mr. Thompson, that he’s going to play with all those big fellows?” And Thompson said, “He’s the most promising footballer we have in the school. The half-back has to be small, you know.”

“Oh, I do hope he won’t get hurt,” said the lady visitor.

“Won’t do him any harm if he is,” said Mr. Thompson.

The whistle went and the game began. Almost at once Jeremy was in trouble. Within the first minute the school fifteen were lining out in their own half of the field, and a moment later some of the “Rest” forwards had broken through, dribbled, tried to pass, thrown forward, and there was a scrum within Jeremy’s twenty-five. This is the kind of thing to make you show your mettle. To be attacked before you have found your atmosphere, realised the conditions of the day, got your feel of yourself as part of the picture, gained your first win, to have to fight for your team’s life with your own goal looming like the gallows just behind you, and to know that the loss of three or five points in the first few minutes of the game is very often a decisive factor in the issue of the battle—all this tests anybody’s greatness. Jeremy in that first five minutes was anything but great. He had a consciousness of his own miserable inadequacy, a state not common to him at all. He seemed to be one large cranium spread out balloon-wise for the onrush of his enemies. As he darted about at the back of the scrum waiting for the ball to be thrown in, he felt as though he could not go down to it; and then, of course, the worst possible thing happened. The “Rest” forwards broke through the scrum; he tried to fling himself on the ball, and missed it, and there they were sliding away past him, making straight for the goal-line. Fortunately, the man with the ball was flung to touch just in time, and there was a breathing space. Jeremy, nevertheless, was tingling with his mistake as acutely as though a try had been scored. He knew what they were saying on the other side of the rope. He knew that Baltimore, for instance, was winking his bleary eyes with pleasure, that all the friends of his rival half were saying in chorus, “Well, young Cole’s no good; I always said so,” and that Riley was glaring fiercely about him and challenging any one to say a word. He knew all this and, unfortunately, for more than a minute had time to think of it, because one of the cool three-quarters got away with the ball and then kicked it to touch, and there was a line out and a good deal of scrambling before the inevitable scrum. This time it was for him to throw in the ball, crying in his funny voice, now hoarse, now squeaky, “Coming on the right, school—shove!” They did shove, and carried it on with them; and then the “Rest” half got it, threw it to one of his three-quarters, who started racing down the field, with only Jeremy in his way before he got to the back. It was that very creature with the bony knees whom Jeremy had watched in the changing-room. The legs wobbled towards him as though with a life of their own. He ran across, threw himself at the knees, and missed them. He went sprawling on to the ground, was conscious that he had banged his nose, that somebody near him was calling out “Butters,” and that his career as a football half was finally and for ever concluded. After that he could do nothing right. The ball seemed devilishly to slip away from him whenever he approached it. He was filled with a demon of anger, but that did not serve him. He again went now here, now there, and always he seemed to be doing the wrong thing. For once that strange sure knowledge innate in him, part of his blood and his bones, of the right, inevitable thing to do, had left him, and he could only act on impulse and hope that it would turn out well, which it never did. The captain, who was a forward, pausing beside him for a moment, said, “Go on, Cole, you can play better than that.” He knew that his worst forebodings were fulfilled.

Then just before the whistle went for half-time, just when he was at his busiest, he had a curious, distinct picture of Uncle Samuel, the red apple tree, and Hamlet lying on the floor of the studio waiting for his rat. People talk about concentration and its importance, and nobody who has ever played a game well but will agree that to let your mind wander at a very critical moment is fatal; but this was not so much the actual wandering of a mind as of a curious insistence from without of this other picture that went with the scene in which he was figuring. It was like the pouring of cold clear water upon his hot and muddled brain. It was also as though Uncle Samuel, in his thick, good-natured voice, had said to him, “Now, look here, I know nothing about this silly game that you’re trying to play, but I’m here to see you go through it, and the two of us together it’s impossible to beat.” The whistle went before he had time to realise the effects of this little intrusion. He stood about during the interval talking to no one, wishing he were dead, but armoured in a cold resolve. After all, he would not write to Uncle Samuel and tell him that he had been left out of the school fifteen because he had not played well enough. No one as yet had scored. The teams seemed to be very evenly matched, which was a bad thing for the school. Every one in the school team was depressed, and the men in the “Rest” were equally elated. If the whole truth were known, the play in the first half had been very ragged indeed, but, as Mr. Thompson explained to the lady visitor, “You mustn’t expect anything else early in the term.” She made the fatuous remark that “after all, they were such little boys,” which made Mr. Thompson reply, with more heat than true politeness required, that his boys, even though they were all under fourteen, could on their day show as good a game as any public school, to which the lady visitor replied that she was sure that they could—she thought they played wonderfully for such little boys.

The whistle sounded, and the game tumbled about, up and down, in and out. Jeremy knew now that all was well. His “game sense” had suddenly come back to him, and the ball seemed to know its master, to tumble to him just when he wanted it, to stick in his hands when he touched it, and even to smile at him when it was quite a long way away, as though it were saying to him, “I’m yours now, and you can do what you like with me.” He brought off a neat piece of collaring, then a little later passed the ball back to his three-quarters, who got, for the first time that day, a clear run, leading to a try in the far corner of the field. Then there came a moment when all the “Rest” forwards were dribbling the ball, the school forwards at their heels, but not fast enough to stop their opponents; and he was down on the ball, had it packed tight under his arm, lying flat upon it, and the whole world of boots, legs, knees, bodies seemed to charge over him. A queer sensation that was—everything falling upon him as though the ceiling of the world had suddenly collapsed. Then the sensation of being buried deep in the ground, bodies wriggling and heaving on top of him, his nose, chin, eyes deep in earth, some huge leg with a gigantic boot at the end of it hovering like a wild animal just above his head; and then the whistle and the sudden clearing of the ground away from him; his impulse to move, and his discovery that his right leg hurt like a piercing sword. He tried to rise, and could not. He was quite alone now, the sky and the wind, the field and the distant hills encircling him, with nobody else in the world. The game stopped, people came back to him. They felt his leg, and it hurt desperately, but not, he knew at once, so desperately that he never would be able to use it again. They rubbed his calf and jerked his knee. He heard somebody say, “Only a kick—no bones broken,” and he set his teeth and stumbled to his feet and stood for a moment feeling exquisite pain. Then, like an old man of ninety, tottered along. At this there was universal applause from behind the ropes. There were cries of “Well stopped, Stocky! Good old Stocky!” and he would not have exchanged that moment for all the prizes in the bookshop or all the tuckshops in Europe. “Are you all right?” his captain shouted across to him. He nodded his head because he certainly would have burst into tears if he had spoken, and he was biting his lower lip until his teeth seemed to go through to his gums. But, in that marvellous fashion that all footballers know, his leg became with every movement easier, and although there was a dull, grinding pain there, he found he could move about quite easily and soon was in the thick of it once more. He was only a “limper” to the end of that game, but he did one or two things quite nicely, and had the happiness of seeing the school score another two tries, which put the issue of the game beyond doubt. At the end, after cheers had been given and returned, the pain in his leg reasserted itself once more, and he could only limp very feebly off the field, but he had the delirious happiness of the captain—who was going to Rugby next year, and was therefore very nearly a man—putting his hand on his shoulder and saying, “That was a plucky game of yours, Cole. Hope your leg isn’t bad.”

“Oh, it isn’t bad at all, thank you,” he said very politely. “I almost don’t feel it,” which was a terrific lie. He had done well. He knew that from the comments on every side of him. The crowd had forgotten his earlier failure, which, if he had only known it, should have taught him that word of wisdom invaluable to artists and sportsmen alike: “Don’t be discouraged by a bad beginning. It’s the last five minutes that count.” Finally there was Riley. “You didn’t play badly,” he said. “You were better than Millett.”

Later he was sitting with Riley, squashed into a corner of Magg’s, eating doughnuts. The crowd in there was terrific and the atmosphere like a slab of chocolate. Riley and he were pressed close together, with boys on every side of them. The noise was deafening. It was the last ten minutes before Magg’s closed. It was Saturday evening, and every one had pocket-money. The two boys did not speak to one another. Jeremy’s leg was hurting him horribly, but he was as happy as “five kings and a policeman,” which was one of Uncle Samuel’s ridiculous, meaningless phrases. His arm was round Riley’s neck, more for support than for sentiment, but he did like Riley and he did like Magg’s. He was, perhaps, at that moment as completely alive as he was ever to be. He was so small that he was almost entirely hidden, but somebody caught sight of his hair, which would never lie down flat, and cried across the room, “Three cheers for Stocky, the football hero!” The cheers were hearty if a little absent-minded, the main business of the moment being food, and not football. Jeremy, of course, was pleased, and in his pleasure overbalanced from the edge of the table where he was sitting, slipped forward, and disappeared from men. His leg hurt him too much, and he was too comfortable on the floor and too generally sleepy to bother to get up again, so he stayed there, his arm round Riley’s leg, swallowing his last doughnut as slowly as possible, feeling that he would like to give doughnuts in general to all the world.

Yes, it had been a fine day, a splendid day, and there would be days and days and days. …

Magg’s was closing. He limped to his feet, and, with their arms round one another’s necks, Riley and he vanished into the dark.