“Now, children,” cried Aunt Amy, as though it were her family, her cab and her party, “mind you enjoy yourselves and tell Mrs. Carstairs that mother doesn’t want you to stay too late. . . .”
They were to pick up Mrs. Carstairs, who lived higher up the terrace, who was a nice rosy-faced woman, a widow with a small boy called Herbert. Because Herbert was their father’s name it had a solemn, grown-up air to the children, and they felt the contrast to be very funny indeed when a small, pale-faced mouse of a boy was piloted into the cab. He was so deeply smothered in shawls and comforters that there was little to be seen but a sharply peaked nose. He was, it seemed, a serious-minded child. Soon after getting into the cab he remarked:
“I do hope that we all enjoy ourselves this evening, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Carstairs, although she was stout and jolly, was so nervous about the health of her only child that she made all the children nervous too.
“You aren’t feeling cold, Bertie darling, are you? . . . You haven’t got a headache, have you? Lean against mother, darling, if you’re tired. Are you tired?”
To all of which Herbert answered very solemnly:
“I am not, mother.”
He was, however, it seemed, a child with a considerable sense of humour, because he suddenly pinched Jeremy in the fatty part of his thigh, and then looked at him very severely as though challenging him to say anything about it, and it suddenly occurred to Jeremy that you had a great advantage if you looked old and solemn, because no one would ever believe anything wicked of you.
His thoughts, however, of young Herbert were soon lost in the excitement of the adventure of the cab. Nothing that he had ever known was more wonderful than this, the rolling through the lighted town, the background so dark like the inside of a box, the tearing through the market-place now so silent and mysterious, down through North Street, over the Pol bridge, and so out into the country. The silence of the high road, rhythmed by the clamp-clamp of the horse’s hoofs, the mysterious gleam of white patches as the road was illumined by the light from the carriage lamps, the heavy thick-set hedges, watching as though they were an army of soldiers drawn up in solemn order to let the carriage pass through, the smell of the night mingled with the smell of the cab, the rattle of the ill-fitting windows, the excited, half-strangled breathing of Mary—all these together produced in Jeremy’s breast a feeling of exaltation, pride and adventure that was never to be forgotten.
They were all packed very closely together and bounced about like marionettes without self-control.