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The departure was depressing and unsettling; the weather was as it always is during January in Glebeshire at its worst, and the Jampot, feeling it all very deeply, maintained a terrible Spartan composure, which was meant to show indifference and a sense of injustice. She had to the very last believed it incredible that she should really go.
Jeremy knew none of these things, and was the happier that he did not. To such a boy such a village was a miracle.... It had not come from Germany, as Aunt Amy said, but from heaven. But it was even more of Uncle Samuel than the village that he was thinking. When they started Helen, Mary and he in charge of the Jampot upon their afternoon walk, he was still asking himself the same questions.
Then perceiving, as all practised fathers instantly must, that the atmosphere was sinful, he changed his voice to that of the Children's Sunday Afternoon Service a voice well known in his family. "Please, sir," began the Jampot, "I'm sorry to 'ave to tell you, sir, that Master Jeremy's not been at all good this morning." "Well, Jeremy," he said, turning to his son, "what is it?"
I wonder whether she knows I knocked Ernest down in the summer and trod on him?" But the sight of the High Street soon restored his equanimity. On other occasions he had been pushed through it, either by the Jampot or Miss Jones, so rapidly that he could gather only the most fleeting impressions. To-day he could linger and linger; he did.
Standing in front of the dog, his short thick legs spread defiantly apart, his fists clenched, he almost shouted: "You shan't touch him.... No, you shan't. I don't care. He shan't go out again and die. You're a cruel, wicked woman." The Jampot gasped. Never, no, never in all her long nursing experience had she been so defied, so insulted.
He did not attempt conversation with anyone. Once or twice the Jampot tried to penetrate behind that little mask of anger and dismay. "Come, now, things aren't so bad as all that. You be a good boy, and go and tell your father you're sorry..." or "Well, then, Master Jeremy, there'll be another time, I dare say, you can go to the the-ayter..." But she found no response.
Such a victory as he had won over the Jampot, a victory that was a further stage in the fight for independence begun on his birthday, might have very awful qualities. There would begin now one of the Jampot's sulks moods well known to the Cole family, and lasting from a day to a week, according to the gravity of the offence. Yes, they had already begun.
It happened to be just the corner where the Jampot kept her sewing machine, and you would think, if you came to the nursery as a stranger, and saw him sitting, his eyes fixed beamingly upon the machine, his tail erect, and his body here and there quivering a little, that from duties of manly devotion he was protecting the Jampot's property.
He stood there, his legs apart, looking upon the darkening world and felt that he could do anything anything... At any rate, there was one thing that he could do, disobey the Jampot. "I'm not coming," he said, "till I choose." "You wicked boy!" she cried, her temper rising with the evening chills, her desire for a cup of hot tea, and an aching longing for a comfortable chair.
He returned, young as he was, and reduced to a corpse-like condition by the rough but kindly intentioned services of Mr. Pilter, with the picture of a hysterical, abandoned world clearly imprinted upon his brain. "I want to go," he said to the Jampot. "You can't," said she. "I will when I'm six," said he. "You won't," said she. "I will when I'm seven," said he. "You won't," said she.
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