I
I am afraid that too great a part of this book is about old maids,but it is hard for anyone who knows only the thriving bustling world of today to realise how largely we children were hemmed in and surrounded by a proper phalanx of elderly single ladies and clergymen.I don't believe that we were any the worse for that,and to such heroines as Miss Jane Maple,Miss Mary Trefusis and old Miss Jessamin Trenchard,I here publicly acknowledge deep and lasting debt-but it did make our life a little monotonous,a little unadventurous,a little circumscribed -and because T am determined to give the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the year of Jeremy's life that I am describing,this book will also,I am afraid,be a little circumscribed,a little unadventurous.
The elderly lady who most thoroughly circumscribed Jeremy was,of course--putting Miss Jones,who was a governess and therefore did not count,aside--Aunt Amy.
Now Aunt Amy was probably the most conceited woman in Polchester.
There is of course ordinary human conceit,of which every living being has his or her share.I am not speaking of that;Miss Amy Trefusis might be said to be fanatically conceited.
Although she was now a really plain elderly woman it is possible that when she was a little girl she was pretty.In any case,it is certain that she was spoiled when she was a little girl,and because she was delicate and selfish she received a good deal more attention and obedience from weak and vacillating elders than she deserved.
After her growing up she had a year or two of moderate looks and she received,during this period,several proposals;these she refused because they were not good enough and something better must be coming very shortly,but what really came very shortly was middle-age,and it came of course entirely unperceived by the lady.She dressed and behaved as though she were still twenty,although her brother Samuel tried to laugh her out of such absurdities.But no sister ever pays attention to a brother on such matters,and Aunt Amy wore coloured ribbons and went to balls and made eyes behind her fan for season after season.Then as time passed she was compelled by her mirror to realise that she was not quite so young as she had once been,so she hurriedly invented a thrilling past history for herself,alluding to affair after affair that had come to nothing only because she herself had ruthlessly slain them,and dressing herself more reasonably,but with little signs and hints,in the shape of chains and coloured bows and rings,that she could still be young if she so pleased,and that she was open to offers,although she could not promise them much encouragement.She liked the society of Canons,and was to be seen a great deal with old Canon Borlase,who was as great a flirt as he was an egotist,so that it did not matter to him in the least with whom he flirted,and sat at the feet of old Canon Morpheu,who was so crazy about the discoveries that he had made in the life of Ezekiel that it was quite immaterial to him to whom he explained them.
She descended from these clerical flights into the bosom of family life with some natural discontent.Her brother Samuel she had always disliked because he laughed at her;her sister she did not care for because she was very innocently,poor lady,flaunting her superior married state;and her brother-in-law she did not like because he always behaved as though she were one of a vast public of elderly ladies who were useful for helping in clerical displays,but were otherwise non-existent.Then she hated children,so that she really often wondered why she continued to live with her brother-in-law,but it was cheap,comfortable and safe,and although she assured herself and everyone else that there were countless homes wildly eager to receive her,it was perhaps just as well not to put their eagerness too abruptly to the test.
There had been war between her and Jeremy since Jeremy's birth,but it had been war of a rather mild and inoffensive character,consisting largely in Jeremy on his side putting out his tongue at her when she could not see him,and she on her side sending him to wash his ears when they really did not require to be washed.She had felt always in Jeremy an obstinate dislike of her,and as he had seemed to her neither a very clever nor intelligent child she had consoled herself very easily with the thought that he did not like her simply because he was stupid.So it had been until this year,and then suddenly they had been flung into sharper opposition.It was hard to say what had brought this about,but it was perhaps that Jeremy had sprung suddenly from the unconscious indifference of a young child into the active participation of a growing boy.Whatever the truth might have been,the coming of Hamlet had drawn their attitudes into positive conflict.
Aunt Amy had felt from the first that Hamlet laughed at her.Had you asked her to state,as a part of her general experience,that she really believed that dogs could laugh at human beings she would indignantly have repudiated any idea so fantastic,nevertheless,unanalysed and unconfronted,that was her conviction.The dog laughed at her,he insulted her by walking into her bedroom with his muddy feet and then pretending that he hadn't known that it was her bedroom,regarding her through his hair with an ironical and malicious glance,barking suddenly when she made some statement as though he enjoyed immensely an excellent joke,but,above all,despising her,she felt,so that the wall of illusion that she had built around herself had been pulled down by at least one creature,more human,she knew,in spite of herself,than many human beings.
Therefore,she hated Hamlet,and scarcely a day passed that she did not try to have him flung from the house,or at least kept in the kitchen offices.
