Hugh Walpole

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:

Your mother has just taken your Aunt Amy to Drymouth on a shopping expedition. The house is so quiet you wouldn’t know it. I am painting a very nice picture of two cows in a blue field. The cows are red. If you were here I would put you into the picture as a dog asleep under a tree. Because you aren’t here, I have to take that wretched animal of yours and use him instead. He is not nearly as like a dog as you are. I had two sausages for breakfast because your Aunt Amy is going to be away for two whole days. I generally have only one sausage and now just about five o’clock this evening I shall have indigestion which will be one more thing I shall owe your Aunt Amy. The woman came in yesterday and washed the floor of the studio. It looks beastly, but I shall soon make it dirty again, and if only you were here it would get dirty quicker. There’s a rumour that your Uncle Percy is coming back to stay with us again. I am training your dog to bite the sort of trousers that your Uncle Percy wears. I have a pair very like his and I draw them across the floor very slowly and make noises to your dog like a cat. The plan is very successful but to-morrow there won’t be any trousers and I shall have to think of something else. Mrs. Sampson asked your mother whether she thought that I would like to paint a portrait of her little girl. I asked your mother how much money Mrs. Sampson would give me for doing so and your mother asked Mrs. Sampson. Mrs. Sampson said that if she liked it when it was done she’d hang it up in her drawing-room where everybody could see and that that would be such a good advertisement for me that there wouldn’t need to be any payment, so I told your mother to tell Mrs. Sampson that I was so busy sweeping a crossing just now that I was afraid I wouldn’t have time to paint her daughter. When I have done these cows, if they turn out really well, perhaps I’ll send the best of them to Mrs. Sampson and tell her that that’s the best portrait of her daughter I was capable of doing. Some people in Paris like my pictures very much and two of them have been hanging in an exhibition and people have to pay to go in and see them. I sold one of them for fifty pounds and therefore I enclose a little bit of paper which if you take it to the right person will help you buy enough sweets to make yourself sick for a whole week. Don’t tell your mother I’ve done this.

Your sister Mary is breaking out into spots. She has five on her forehead. I think it’s because she sucks her pencil so hard.

Your sister Barbara tumbled all the way down the stairs yesterday but didn’t seem to mind. She is the best of the family and shortly I intend to invite her into the studio and let her lick my paint box.

Outside my window at this moment there is an apple tree and the hills are red, the same colour as the apples. Someone is burning leaves and the smoke turns red as it gets high enough and then comes white again when it gets near the moon, which is a new one and exactly like one of your Aunt Amy’s eyelashes.

I am getting so fat that I think of living in a barrel, as a very famous man about whom I’ll tell you one day, used to do. I think I’ll have a barrel with a lid on the top of it so that when people come into the studio whom I don’t want to see, I shall just shut the lid and they won’t know I’m there. I think I’ll have the barrel painted bright blue.

Your dog thinks there’s a rat just behind my bookcase. He lies there for hours at a time purring like a kettle. There may be a rat but knowing life as well as I do there never is a rat where you most expect one. That’s one of the things your father hasn’t learnt yet. He is writing his sermon in his study. If he knew there weren’t any rats he wouldn’t write so many sermons.

I’ve been reading a very funny book by a man called France, and the funny thing is that he is also a Frenchman. Isn’t that a funny thing? You shall read it one day when you’re older and then you’ll understand your Uncle Samuel better than you do now.

Well, good-bye. I hope you’re enjoying yourself and haven’t entirely forgotten your

Uncle.

P.S.—I promise you that the lid shall never be on the barrel when you’re there, and if you don’t get too fat, there’s room for two inside.

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 realized 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 realized that great truth that one person in the world is quite enough. One human being who understands your strange mixture equalizes 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 of 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 his 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 dough-nuts.”

“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.