“My dear Jeremy,” his mother said, “I'd forgotten you were there. Rose says you don't do anything Miss Jones tells you.”
“Rose is silly,” he answered. “She doesn't know anything about it. But you will keep her, won't you, Mother?”
“I don't know--if she can't manage you--”
“But she can manage us. We'll be good as anything, I promise. You will keep her, won't you, Mother?”
“Really, Jeremy,” said Aunt Amy, “to bother your mother so! And it's nearly time you went to bed.”
He brushed her aside. “You will keep her, Mother, won't you?”
“It depends, dear,” said Mrs. Cole, laughing. “You see--”
“No--we'll be bad with everyone else,” he cried. “We will, really--everyone else. And we'll be good with Miss Jones.”
“Well, so long as you're good, dear,” she said. “I'd no idea you liked her so much.”
“Oh, she's all right,” he said. “But it isn't that--” Then he stopped; he couldn't explain--especially with that idiot Aunt Amy there, who'd only laugh at him, or kiss him, or something else horrible.
Afterwards, as he went slowly up to bed, he stopped for a moment in the dark passage thinking. The whole house was silent about him, only the clocks whispering.
What a tiresome bother Aunt Amy was! How he wished that she were dead! And what a bore it would be being good now with Miss Jones. At the same time, the renewed consciousness of her personal drama most strangely moved him--her brother who rowed, her neuralgia, her lack of relations. Perhaps Aunt Amy also had an exciting history! Perhaps she also cried!
The world seemed to be suddenly filled with pressing, thronging figures, all with businesses of their own.
He pushed back the schoolroom door and blinked at the sudden light.
Very few matter-of-fact citizens of the present-day world will understand the part that the sea used to play in our young lives thirty years ago in Polchester.
It is very easy to look at the map and say that the sea is a considerable distance from Polchester, and that even if you stood on the highest ridge of the highest cornfield above the town you would not be able to catch the faintest glimpse of it. That may be true, although I myself can never be completely assured, possessing so vividly as I do a memory of a day when I stood with my nurse at the edge of Merazion Woods and, gazing out to the horizon, saw a fleet of ships full-sail upon the bluest of seas, and would not be persuaded that it was merely wrack of clouds. That may be or no; the fact remains that Polchester sniffed the sea from afar, was caught with sea breezes and bathed in reflected sea-lights; again and again of an evening the Cathedral sailed on dust and shadow towards the horizon, a great white ghost of a galleon, and the young citizens of the town with wondering eyes, watched it go. But there were more positive influences than mere cloud and light. We had, in the lower part of our town, sailors, quite a number of them. There were the old white-bearded ones who would sit upon tubs and tell smuggling tales; these haunted the River Pol, fished in it, ferried people across it, and let out boats for hire. There were younger sailors who, tired of the still life of their little villages and dreading the real hard work of a life at sea, lurched and slouched by the Pol's river bed, fishing a little, sleeping, eating and drinking a great deal.