Jeremy | Page 8

his extreme relief, the door opened
and the elders arriving saved him.
There were Father and Mother, Uncle Samuel and Aunt Amy, all with
presents, faces of birthday tolerance and "do-as-you-please-to-day,
dear" expressions.
The Rev. Herbert Cole was forty years of age, rector of St. James's,
Polchester, during the last ten years, and marked out for greater
preferment in the near future. To be a rector at thirty is unusual, but he
had great religious gifts, preached an admirable "as-man-to- man"
sermon, and did not believe in thinking about more than he could see.
He was an excellent father in the abstract sense, but the parish absorbed

too much of his time to allow of intimacies with anyone.
Mrs. Cole was the most placid lady in Europe. She had a comfortable
figure, but was not stout, here a dimple and there a dimple. Nothing
could disturb her. Children, servants, her husband's sermons, district
visiting, her Tuesday "at homes," the butcher, the dean's wife, the wives
of the canons, the Polchester climate, bills, clothes, other women's
clothes--over all these rocks of peril in the sea of daily life her barque
happily floated. Some ill-natured people thought her stupid, but in her
younger days she had liked Trollope's novels in the Cornhill,
disapproved placidly of "Jane Eyre," and admired Tennyson, so that
she could not be considered unliterary.
She was economical, warm-hearted, loved her children, talked only the
gentlest scandal, and was a completely happy woman--all this in the
placidest way in the world. Miss Amy Trefusis, her sister, was very
different, being thin both in her figure and her emotions. She skirted
tempestuously over the surface of things, was the most sentimental of
human beings, was often in tears over reminiscences of books or the
weather, was deeply religious in a superficial way, and really--although
she would have been entirely astonished had you told her so--cared for
no one in the world but herself. She was dressed always in dark colours,
with the high shoulders of the day, elegant bonnets and little chains that
jingled as she moved. In her soul she feared and distrusted children, but
she did not know this. She did know, however, that she feared and
distrusted her brother Samuel.
Her brother Samuel was all that the Trefusis family, as a conservative
body who believed in tradition, had least reason for understanding. He
had been a failure from the first moment of his entry into the Grammar
School in Polchester thirty-five years before this story. He had
continued a failure at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford. He had
desired to be a painter; he had broken from the family and gone to
study Art in Paris. He had starved and starved, was at death's door, was
dragged home, and there suddenly had relapsed into Polchester, lived
first on his father, then on his brother-in-law, painted about the town,
painted, made cynical remarks about the Polcastrians, painted, made

blasphemous remarks about the bishop, the dean and all the canons,
painted, and refused to leave his brother-in-law's house. He was a
scandal, of course; he was fat, untidy, wore a blue tam-o'-shanter when
he was "out," and sometimes went down Orange Street in carpet
slippers.
He was a scandal, but what are you to do if a relative is obstinate and
refuses to go? At least make him shave, say the wives of the canons.
But no one had ever made Samuel Trefusis do anything that he did not
want to do. He was sometimes not shaved for three whole days and
nights. At any rate, there he is. It is of no use saying that he does not
exist, as many of the Close ladies try to do. And at least he does not
paint strange women; he prefers flowers and cows and the Polchester
woods, although anything less like cows, flowers and woods, Mrs.
Sampson, wife of the Dean, who once had a water-colour in the
Academy, says she has never seen. Samuel Trefusis is a failure, and,
what is truly awful, he does not mind; nobody buys his pictures and he
does not care; and, worst taste of all, he laughs at his relations, although
he lives on them. Nothing further need be said.
To Helen, Mary and Jeremy he had always been a fascinating object,
although they realised, with that sharp worldly wisdom to be found in
all infants of tender years, that he was a failure, a dirty man, and
disliked children. He very rarely spoke to them; was once quite wildly
enraged when Mary was discovered licking his paints. (It was the
paints he seemed anxious about, not in the least the poor little thing's
health, as his sister Amy said), and had publicly been heard to say that
his brother-in-law had only got