His first idea was that he would get Uncle Samuel to tell him the story; but when he showed his uncle the book, that gentleman waved his paint-brush in the air and said that “Walter was a fine old gentleman who died game, but a rotten writer, and it was a shame to make kids wade through his abominable prose.” There was, then, no hope here. Jeremy looked at the book, read half a page, and then threw it at Hamlet.
But the stern truth of the matter was that in such a matter as this, and indeed in most of the concerns of his daily life, he resembled a spy working his way through the enemy’s camp, surrounded on every side by foes, compelled to consider every movement, doomed to death and dishonour if he were caught. It had come to it now that there was in practical fact nothing that he desired to do that he was not forbidden to do, and because his school life had given him rules and standards that did not belong to his home life, he criticized at every turn. There was, for instance, this affair of walking in the town by himself. He could understand that Helen and Mary should not go by themselves because there was apparently something mysterious and precious in girls that was destroyed were they left alone for a single moment. But a boy! a boy who had travelled by himself all those miles to a distant county; a boy who, in all probability would be the half-back for the school next term, a boy who in another two years would be at a public school!
What it came to, of course, was that he was continually giving his elders the slip; was, indeed, like the spy in the enemy’s country, because every move had to be considered and, at the end, all the excuses ranged in a long row and the most serviceable carefully chosen. And threadbare by now they were becoming!
On this particular afternoon—the first of the last three days of the holidays—he gave Miss Jones and Helen the slip in the market-place. This was to-day easy to do, because it was market day; he knew that Helen was too deeply concerned with herself and her appearance to care whether he were there or no, and that Miss Jones, delighted as she always was with the shops (knowing them by heart and yet never tired of them), would optimistically trust that he would very soon reappear, and at any rate he knew his way home.
He was always delighted with the market on market days. Never, although so constantly repeated, did it lose its savour for him. He adored everything—the cattle and the sheep in their pens, the farmers with their thick broad backs and thick broad sticks talking in such solemn and serious clusters, the avenue down the middle of the market-place where you walked past stall after stall—stalls of vegetables, stalls of meat, stalls of cups and saucers, stalls of china ornaments, stalls of pots and pans, and, best—far best of all—the flower-stalls with their pots of beautiful flowers, their seeds and their tiny plants growing in rows in wooden boxes. But it was not the outside market that was the most truly entrancing. On the right of the market-place there were strange mysterious passages—known to the irreverent as the Catacombs—and here, in a dusk that would, you would have supposed, have precluded any real buying or selling altogether—the true business of the market went on.
It was here, under these dark ages, that in his younger days the toy-shop had enchanted him, and even now, although he would own it to no one alive, the trains and the air-guns seemed to him vastly alluring. There was also a football—too small for him; not at all the football that he wanted to buy—but nevertheless better than nothing at all. He looked at it. The price was eight and sixpence, and he had in his pocket precisely fivepence halfpenny. He sighed, fingered the ball that was hanging in mid-air, and it revolved round and round in the most entrancing manner. The old woman with the moustache who had, it was reputed, ever since the days of Genesis managed the toy-shop, besought him in wheedling tones to purchase it. He could only sigh again, look at it lovingly, twirl it round once more and pass on. He was in that mood when he must buy something—an entrancing, delicious and intoxicating mood, a mood that Helen and Mary were in all the time and would continue to remain in it, like the rest of their sex, until the end, for them, of purses, money and all earthly hopes and ambitions.
Next to the toy-stall was a funny old bookstall. Always hitherto he had passed this; not that it was uninteresting, because the old man who kept the place had coloured prints that he stuck, with pins, into the wooden sides of his booth, and these prints were delightful—funny people in old costumes, coaches stuck in the snow, or a number of stout men tumbling about the floor after drinking too much. But the trouble with Mr. Samuel Porter was that he did not change his prints often enough, being, as anyone could see, a man of lazy and indifferent habits; and when Jeremy had seen the same prints for over a year, he naturally knew them by heart.
On this particular day, however, old Mr. Samuel had changed his prints, and there were some splendid new ones in purples and reds and greens, representing skating on the ice, going up in a balloon, an evening in Vauxhall and the fun of the fair. Jeremy stared at these with open mouth, especially at the fun of the fair, which was most amusing because in it a pig was running away and upsetting everybody, just as it might quite easily do here in the market-place. He stood looking, and Mr. Porter, who wore a faded green hat and large spectacles and hated little boys because they never bought anything, but only teased him and ran away, looked at him out of the corner of his eye and dared him to be cheeky. He had no intention whatever of being cheeky; he stared at the books, all so broken and old and melancholy, and thought what a dreary thing having to read was, and how unfortunate about his holiday task, and how silly of him to have thought of it just at that moment and so spoiled his afternoon.
He would then have passed on had it not been by the strangest coincidence that at that very instant his eye fell on a little pile of books at the front of the stall, and the book on the top of the pile had the very name of his holiday task: “The Talisman,” by Sir Walter Scott, Bart. It was the strangest looking book, very different indeed from the book at home.
He stared at it as though it was a lucky charm. How strange that it should be there and appearing so oddly different from the book at home. It was dressed in shabby and faded yellow covers; he picked it up. On the outside he read in large letters: “Stead’s Penny Classics!” Penny! Could it be that this book was only a penny? Why, if so, he could buy it and four others like it! This sudden knowledge gave him a new proprietary interest in the book, as when you discover that a stranger at an hotel lives, when at home, in your own street! Opening the little book he saw that the print was very small indeed, that the lines were crooked and irregular, here very black and there only a dim grey. But in the very fact of this faint print there was something mysterious and appealing. No notes here, of course, and no undue emphasis on this “Scott, Bart.” man, simply “The Talisman,” short and sweet.