Jeremy and Hamlet/Chapter 4

HE old town, like human beings, had its moods of excited reminiscence. Why should it not? Now brooding, now suddenly waking into lightning flashes of dramatic history, so that every one in the place, scarcely knowing why, began to dream of the old days when armoured men fought all the way down the High Street and up again, and the Black Bishop rode on his great horse to the edge of the rock where the cloisters now are and saw the beggarly heretics flung over far down into the waters below; and the peasants had their fair up on the hill above the Pol (and were all so be-drunken that they set the town on fire, so that three-quarters of it was burnt to the ground in 1457, as every one knows, and the cathedral itself only saved by a miracle); and the meeting of the maidens in the market-place, who brought a flag which they had worked to send to Monmouth in Bridgewater; and the last drowning of a witch—old Mother Huckepinch—in the Pol in 1723; and so farther and farther and farther. History, history, history—it lay thick as dust about the town, and only needed a little stirring of the town’s soil to send the dust up into people’s eyes, making them think of times dead and gone and ghosts closer still about them, perhaps, than they cared to think.

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. For some of us that actual moment was so dramatic, so strangely concrete and definite, so friendly (as though it were some one suddenly appearing out of the dark and speaking to us and showing us that we were not alone, either in experience or desire as we had supposed) that we cannot possibly forget its precise time and colour. 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.

With Jeremy there had been already definite signs—his adventure years ago with the sea captain, his days on the beach at Rafiel, his friendship with Uncle Samuel; but his actual realization of something strange and mysterious, ancient and yet present, friendly and yet hostile, reassuring and yet terrifying, active and yet quiescent, his recognition of “that life beyond the wall,” dated quite definitely from his discovery of Saladin and his strange adventure in the cathedral.

As I have already said on that particular week—the last week of his Christmas holidays—the town was up to its tricks. 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. 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. He felt, perhaps, that as the holidays had begun so awfully with that terrible disaster of the Christmas presents, it was up to him to see that they ended properly. And then he was truly a good little boy who wanted things to go well and every one to be comfortable and happy, only so strangely moods would creep in, and desires and ambitions, and grown-up people would have such an amazing point of view about boys and misunderstand their natural impulses so dreadfully—what he meant was that if he were grown up and had a boy “he wouldn’t be such an ass!”

The trouble of these last three days all began by his suddenly remembering that he had never read his holiday task. He did not remember of himself, but was reminded by Bill Bartlett, whom he met in the High Street, who said that the last two days had been miserable for him by having to swot at his rotten holiday task and that he didn’t know anything about it now!

Jeremy had completely forgotten his. He hurried home and dragged it forth from its deserted corner. “The Talisman: A Tale of the Crusades,” by Sir Walter Scott, Bart.

It was a horrible-looking book with a dark green cover, no pictures, and rows of notes at the end. Jeremy was not as yet a very great reader of anything, being slow and lazy about it and very eager to skip the difficult words.

His favourite two books were “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” simply because, in those books, people invented things in a jolly way. And after all, any day one might be on a desert island, and it was useful to know what to do. Of “Sir Walter Scott, Bart.,” he had never in his life heard, nor did he wish to hear of him. Nevertheless, something must be done. Old Thompson took holiday tasks very seriously indeed. Jeremy’s report last term had not been a very good one, and father’s eye was upon him.

His first idea was that he would get Uncle Samuel to tell him the story; but when he showed his uncle the book, that gentleman waved his paint-brush in the air and said that “Walter was a fine old gentleman who died game, but a rotten writer, and it was a shame to make kids wade through his abominable prose.” There was, then, no hope here. Jeremy looked at the book, read half a page, and then threw it at Hamlet.

But the stern truth of the matter was that in such a matter as this, and indeed in most of the concerns of his daily life, he resembled a spy working his way through the enemy’s camp, surrounded on every side by foes, compelled to consider every movement, doomed to death and dishonour if he were caught. It had come to it now that there was in practical fact nothing that he desired to do that he was not forbidden to do, and because his school life had given him rules and standards that did not belong to his home life, he criticized at every turn. There was, for instance, this affair of walking in the town by himself.

He could understand that Helen and Mary should not go by themselves because there was apparently something mysterious and precious in girls that was destroyed were they left alone for a single moment. But a boy! a boy who had travelled by himself all those miles to a distant county; a boy who, in all probability would be the half-back for the school next term, a boy who in another two years would be at a public school!

What it came to, of course, was that he was continually giving his elders the slip; was, indeed, like the spy in the enemy’s country, because every move had to be considered and, at the end, all the excuses ranged in a long row and the most serviceable carefully chosen. And threadbare by now they were becoming!

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. Never, although so constantly repeated, did it lose its savour for him. He adored everything—the cattle and the sheep in their pens, the farmers with their thick broad backs and thick broad sticks talking in such solemn and serious clusters, the avenue down the middle of the market-place where you walked past stall after stall—stalls of vegetables, stalls of meat, stalls of cups and saucers, stalls of china ornaments, stalls of pots and pans, and, best—far best of all—the flower-stalls with their pots of beautiful flowers, their seeds and their tiny plants growing in rows in wooden boxes. But it was not the outside market that was the most truly entrancing. On the right of the market-place there were strange mysterious passages—known to the irreverent as the Catacombs—and here, in a dusk that would, you would have supposed, have precluded any real buying or selling altogether—the true business of the market went on.

It was here, under these dark ages, that in his younger days the toy-shop had enchanted him, and even now, although he would own it to no one alive, the trains and the air-guns seemed to him vastly alluring. There was also a football—too small for him; not at all the football that he wanted to buy—but nevertheless better than nothing at all. He looked at it. The price was eight and sixpence, and he had in his pocket precisely fivepence halfpenny. He sighed, fingered the ball that was hanging in mid-air, and it revolved round and round in the most entrancing manner. The old woman with the moustache who had, it was reputed, ever since the days of Genesis managed the toy-shop, besought him in wheedling tones to purchase it. He could only sigh again, look at it lovingly, twirl it round once more and pass on. He was in that mood when he must buy something—an entrancing, delicious and intoxicating mood, a mood that Helen and Mary were in all the time and would continue to remain in it, like the rest of their sex, until the end, for them, of purses, money and all earthly hopes and ambitions.

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. But the trouble with Mr. 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.

On this particular day, however, old Mr. Samuel had changed his prints, and there were some splendid new ones in purples and reds and greens, representing “Skating on the Ice,” “Going Up in a Balloon, “An Evening in Vauxhall” and the “Fun of the Fair.” Jeremy stared at these with open mouth, especially at the “Fun of the Fair,” which was most amusing because in it a pig was running away and upsetting everybody, just as it might quite easily do here in the market-place. He stood looking, and Mr. Porter, who wore a faded green hat and large spectacles and hated little boys because they never bought anything, but only teased him and ran away, looked at him out of the corner of his eye and dared him to be cheeky. He had no intention whatever of being cheeky; he stared at the books, all so broken and old and melancholy, and thought what a dreary thing having to read was, and how unfortunate about his holiday task, and how silly of him to have thought of it just at that moment and so spoiled his afternoon.

He would then have passed on had it not been by the strangest coincidence that at that very instant his eye fell on a little pile of books at the front of the stall, and the book on the top of the pile had the very name of his holiday task: “The Talisman,” by Sir Walter Scott, Bart. It was the strangest looking book, very different indeed from the book at home.

He stared at it as though it was a lucky charm. How strange that it should be there and appearing so oddly different from the book at home. It was dressed in shabby and faded yellow covers; he picked it up. On the outside he read in large letters: “Stead’s Penny Classics!” Penny! Could it be that this book was only a penny? Why, if so, he could buy it and four others like it! This sudden knowledge gave him a new proprietary interest in the book, as when you discover that a stranger at an hotel lives, when at home, in your own street! Opening the little book he saw that the print was very small indeed, that the lines were crooked and irregular, here very black and there only a dim grey. But in the very fact of this faint print there was something mysterious and appealing. No notes here, of course, and no undue emphasis on this “Scott, Bart.” man, simply “The Talisman,” short and sweet.

Old Mr. Porter, observing the unusual sight of a small boy actually taking a book in his hands and reading it, was interested. He had seen the small boy often enough, and although he would never admit it to himself, had liked his look of sturdy independence and healthy self-assurance. He had not thought that the boy was a reader. He leaned forward:

“Only a penny,” he wheezed (he suffered terribly from asthma, and the boys of the town used to call after him “Old Barrel Organ”), “and just the story for a boy like you.”

“I’ll have it,” said Jeremy with sudden pride. He was of half a mind to buy some of the others—he saw that one more was by “Scott, Bart.”—but no. He would see how this one was before he ventured any farther.

He walked off with his prize.

That night he did what he had never done before, he read in bed.

He was doing as he well knew what was absolutely forbidden, and the novelty of the event, the excitement of his disobedience, the strange wobbly light that the candle flung as it shifted when his movements were very impetuous, in its insecure china saucer, the way the lines of the printed page ran tumultuously together, all these things helped his sense of the romantic.

He had found every line a difficulty in the other edition, now the sense of indulging the forbidden carried him across the first page or two, and then he was fairly inside it! The little book was very difficult to read; not only was it vilely printed, but also the words ran in a kind of cascade down into the very binding of the book, and you had to pull the thing apart as wide as it would go and then peer into the very depths of darkness and obscurity. Nevertheless it was his book, bought with his own money, and he read and read on and on. … And in the morning he read again, and in the evening … and on the fourth day, late in the night, the candle very low in its china socket, the room lit with sudden flashes of bizarre brilliance, the book was finished.

He was dazzled, bewildered. He could think of nothing else at all. The very first meeting of the knights in the desert had marvellously caught his fancy. He had never imagined anything like that, so courteous, so amiable and so fierce! Just so would he entertain the Dean’s Ernest did he meet him in the desert, sharing his food and drink with him, complimenting him on his armour and his horse (he would be very showy, would the Dean’s Ernest), and the next day sticking his spear through his vitals. Yes, that would be intensely pleasing, but the trouble would be that the Dean’s Ernest would most certainly not play fair, but would seize some mean advantage (steal all Jeremy’s dates when he wasn’t looking, or give him one in the back).

Then the visit to the hermit’s cave and the silence of the chapel and the procession of the wonderful ladies and the dropping of the rose at Sir Kenneth’s feet.

From that point forward Jeremy dwelt under enchantment. Nothing could take him from it. And he believed every word of it! Just as true to him these men and deeds of the Eastern desert as were the men and deeds of Orange Street, Polchester. Truer indeed! 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. Jeremy had formed a habit now of dropping into Uncle Samuel’s studio whenever it pleased him.

The other children watched him with eyes of wonder and desire. Even Aunt Amy was surprised. She said a little but sniffed a lot, and told her brother that he “would regret the day.” He laughed and told her that Jeremy was “the only artist among the lot of them,” at which Aunt Amy went to Jeremy’s father and told him to be careful because her brother “was filling the child’s head with all sorts of notions that could do him no possible good.”

Jeremy behaved like a saint in his uncle’s studio. He had his own corner of the shabby sofa where he would sit curled up like a dog. He chattered on and on, pouring out the whole of his mind, heart and soul, keeping nothing back, because his uncle seemed to understand everything and never made you feel a fool. He attacked him at once about Saladin and would not let him alone. 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.

Never to any living soul had Uncle Samuel confided that he cared in the least about the old town; in his heart, nevertheless, he adored it, and for years had he been studying its life and manners. To his grave his knowledge would have gone with him had not Jeremy, in the secrecy of the studio, lured him on.

Then, as though they were dram-drinking together, did the two sit close and talk about the town, and under the boy’s eyes the streets blossomed like the rose, the fountains played, the walls echoed to the cries and shouts of armoured men, and the cathedral towers rose ever higher and higher, gigantic, majestic, wonderful, piercing the eternal sky.

Best of all he liked to hear about the Black Bishop, that proud priest who had believed himself greater than the High God, had defeated all his enemies, lived in the castle on the hill above the town like a king, and was at last encircled by a ring of foes, caught in the Cathedral Square, and died there fighting to the end.

Jeremy would never forget one afternoon when he sat on the floor, his head against the shabby sofa, and Uncle Samuel, who was doing something to his paint-box, became carried away with the picture of his story. He drew for Jeremy the old town with the gabled roofs and the balconies and the cobbled roads, and the cathedral so marvellously alive above it all. As he talked the winter sun poured into the room in a golden stream, making the whitewashed walls swan-colour, turning some old stuffs that he had hanging over the door and near the window into wine-red shadow and purple light; and the trees beyond the high windows were stained copper against the dusky sky.

Uncle Samuel’s voice stopped and the room slid into grey. Jeremy stared before him and saw Saladin and the Black Bishop, gigantic figures hovering over the town that was small and coloured like a musical box. The cathedral was a new place to him, no longer somewhere that was tiresome and dreary on Sunday and dead all the rest of the week. He longed to go there by himself, alone, nobody to see what he would do and hear what he would say. He would go! He would go! He nodded to himself in the dark.

All very well, but he must be quick about it if these holidays were to see him bring it off. Only three days!

Then Aunt Amy announced that she intended on this fine afternoon to pay a call on Miss Nightingale who lived in the Precincts, and to her great surprise Jeremy suggested that he should accompany her.

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. She adored the way that his mouth went up at the corners when he laughed; she liked his voice when it was hoarse with a serious effort to persuade somebody of something. Then, although he had so often been rude to her, she could not deny that he was a thorough little gentleman in all that she meant by that term. 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. She had, in fact, both a family and an individual pride in him.

He was very funny to-day walking up the High Street; she could not understand him at all.

“Would you jump, Aunt Amy, if you suddenly saw the Black Bishop on his coal-black horse, with his helmet and suit of mail, riding along down the High Street?”

“The Black Bishop? What Black Bishop?”

Was the boy being impertinent to dear Bishop Crozier, whose hair was in any case white, who had certainly never ridden a coal-black horse. …

Jeremy carefully explained.

“Oh! the one in the cathedral! Oh! but he was dead and buried long ago!”

“Yes; but if he should come to life! He was strong enough for anything.”

“What an idea!” She couldn’t think where the boy got those strange irreligious ideas from—from her brother Samuel, she supposed!

“The dead don’t come back like that, Jeremy dear,” she explained gently. “How do you do, Miss Mackenzie? Oh, much better, thank you. It was only a little foolish toothache—it isn’t right of us to suppose they do. 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. …”

“Oh, there’s Mrs. 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.”

All right! Of course he would be all right!

“If you like to wait here and just see, perhaps Miss Nightingale won’t be in, and then we could go back together.”

No, he thought he wouldn’t wait because he had promised Miss Jones who would be on the other side of the cathedral. Very well, then.

He watched his aunt ring Miss Nightingale’s very neat little door bell, and saw her then admitted into Miss Nightingale’s very neat little house. At that moment the cathedral chimes struck a quarter past four. He stepped across the path, pushed up the heavy leather flap of the great door and entered. Afternoon service, which began at half past three, was just ending. Some special saint’s day. Far, far away in the distance the canon’s voice beautifully echoed. The choir responded. “The peace of God that passeth all understanding. … Passeth all understanding! Passeth all understanding,” repeated the thick pillars and the high-arched roof, dove-coloured now in the dusk, and the deep, black-stained seats. “Passeth all understanding! All understanding!” The flag-stones echoed deep, deep into the ground. The organ rolled into a voluntary; white flecks of colour splashed for a moment against the screen and were gone. Two or three people, tourists probably, came slowly down the nave, paused for a moment to look at the garrison window with the Christ and the little children, and went out through the west end door. The organ rolled on, the only sound now in the building.

Jeremy was suddenly frightened. Strange that a place which had always seemed to him the last word in commonplace should now terrify him. It was different, alive, moving in the heart of its shadows, whispering.

He walked down the side aisle looking at every tablet, every monument, every window, with a new interest. The aliveness of the church walked with him; it was as though, as he passed them, they gathered themselves and followed in a long, grey, silent procession after him. He reached the side chapel where was the tomb of the Black Bishop. There he lay, safely enclosed behind the golden grill, his gauntleted hands folded on his chest, his spurs on his heels, angels supporting his head, and grim defiance in his face.

Jeremy stared and stared and stared again. About him and around him and above him the cathedral seemed to grow vaster and vaster. Clouds of dusk filled it; the colour from the windows and the tombs and the great gold trumpeting angels stained the shadows with patches of light.

Jeremy was cold and shivered; he looked up, and there, opposite him, standing on the raised steps leading to the choir, was the Black Bishop. He was there just as Jeremy had fancied him, standing, his legs a little apart, one mailed fist resting on his sword, his thick black beard sweeping his breast-plate. He was staring at Jeremy and seemed to be challenging him to move.

The boy could only stare back. Some spirit in him seemed to bid him remember that this was true, whatever soon might disprove it, that the past was the present and the present the past, that nothing ever died, that nothing must frighten him because it survived, and that he must take his share in his inheritance.

All that he really thought was: “I wonder if he’ll come nearer.” But he did not. 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?”

“Yes,” said Jeremy, looking back behind him as he turned away. Oh! but his face had been fine! So strong, like a rock, his sword had shone and his gauntlets! How tall he had been, and how mighty his chest.

“That’s right! That’s right. Remember me to them when you get home. You must come up and play with my little girls one of these afternoons.”

“I’m going back to school,” Jeremy said, “day after to-morrow.”

“Well, well. That’s a pity, that’s a pity. Another day, perhaps. Good day to you. Good day.”

Chanting, he went along, and Jeremy stood outside the cathedral staring about him. Lights were blowing in the wind; the dusk was blue and grey. The air was thick with armoured men marching in a vast procession across the sky. The wind blew, they flashed downwards in a cloud, wheeling up into the sky again as though under command.

The air cleared; the huge front of the cathedral was behind him, and before him, under the Precinct’s lamp, Miss Jones and Helen.

“Why, Jeremy, where have you been? We’ve been looking for you everywhere. We were just going home.”

“Come on,” Jeremy growled. “It’s late.”