Jeremy and Hamlet

There was a certain window between the kitchen and the pantry that
was Hamlet's favourite. Thirty years ago--these chronicles are of
the year 1894--the basements of houses in provincial English towns,
even of large houses owned by rich people, were dark, chill, odour-
full caverns hissing with ill-burning gas and smelling of ill-
cooked cabbage. The basement of the Coles' house in Polchester was
as bad as any other, but this little window between the kitchen and
the pantry was higher in the wall than the other basement windows,
almost on a level with the iron railings beyond it, and offering a
view down over Orange Street and, obliquely, sharp to the right and
past the Polchester High School, a glimpse of the Cathedral Towers
themselves.

Inside the window was a shelf, and on this shelf Hamlet would sit
for hours, his peaked beard interrogatively a-tilt, his leg
sticking out from his square body as though it were a joint-leg and
worked like the limb of a wooden toy, his eyes, sad and mysterious,
staring into Life. . . .

It was not, of course, of Life that he was thinking; only very high-
bred and in-bred dogs are conscious philosophers.

His ears were stretched for a sound of the movements of Mrs.
Hounslow the cook, his nostrils distended for a whiff of the food
that she was manipulating, but his eyes were fixed upon the passing
show, the pageantry, the rough-and-tumble of the world, and every
once and again the twitch of his Christmas-tree tail would show
that something was occurring in this life beyond the window that
could supervene, for a moment at any rate, over the lust of the
stomach and the lure of the clattering pan.

He was an older dog than he had been on that snowy occasion of his
first meeting with the Cole family--two years older in fact. Older
and fatter. He had now a round belly. His hair hung as wildly as
ever it had done around his eyes, but beneath the peaked and
aristocratic beard there was a sad suspicion of a double chin.

HE HAD SOLD HIS SOUL TO THE COOK.

When we sell our souls we are ourselves, of course, in the main
responsible. But others have often had more to do with our
catastrophe than the world in general can know. Had Jeremy, his
master, not gone to school, Hamlet's soul would yet have been his
own; Jeremy gone, Hamlet's spiritual life was nobody's concern. He
fell down, deep down, into the very heart of the basement, and
nobody minded.

He himself did not mind; he was very glad. He loved the basement.

It had happened that during the last holidays Jeremy had gone into
the country to stay with the parents of a school friend--Hamlet had
had therefore nearly nine months' freedom from his master's
influence. Mr. and Mrs. Cole did not care for him very deeply.
Helen hated him. Mary loved him but was so jealous of Jeremy's
affection for him that she was not sorry to see him banished, and
Barbara, only two and a half, had as yet very tenuous ideas on this
subject.

Mrs. Hounslow, a very fat, sentimental woman, liked to have
something or someone at her side to give her rich but transient
emotions--emotions evoked by a passing band, the reading of an
accident in the newspaper, or some account of an event in the Royal
family. The kitchen-maid, a girl of no home and very tender years,
longed for affection from somebody, but Mrs. Hounslow disliked all
kitchen-maids on principle--therefore Hamlet received what the
kitchen-maid needed, and that is the way of the world.