Jeremy began to be very unhappy. He no longer considered what the other boys might say, neither their jeers nor their laughter. One evening, coming up to Baltimore in the playground, he caught his arm.
“You can come and do prep with me to-night if you like,” he said.
“Has anyone been going for you lately?” he asked.
“Oh, you’ll be all right soon,” said Jeremy.
But he could get nothing out of him. Some of the boy’s loneliness seemed to penetrate his own spirit.
“I say, you can be as much with me as you like, you know,” he remarked awkwardly.
Baltimore nodded his head and moved away.
Bitterly was Jeremy to regret that word of his. It was as though Baltimore had laid a trap for him, pretending loneliness in order to secure that invitation. He was suddenly once again with Jeremy everywhere.
And now he was no longer either silent or humble. Words poured from his mouth, words inevitably, unavoidably connected with himself and his doings, his fine brave doings—how he was this at home and that at home, how his aunt had thought the one and his mother the other, how his father had given him a pony and his cousin a dog. . . .
Now round every corner his besmudged face would be appearing, his inky fingers protruding, his voice triumphantly proclaiming:
“I’m coming with you now, Cole. There’s an hour before prep.”
And strangely now, in spite of himself, Jeremy liked it. He was suddenly touched by young Baltimore and his dirt and his helplessness. Later years were to prove that Jeremy Cole could be always caught, held and won by something misshapen, abused, cast out by society. So now he was caught by young Baltimore. He did his sums for him (when he could—he was no great hand at sums), protected him from Tubby Smith, the bully of the lower fourth, shepherded him in and out of meals, took him for walks on Sunday afternoons. . . .
He was losing Riley. That hurt him desperately. Nevertheless he continued in his serious, entirely unsentimental way to look after Baltimore.
And was young Baltimore grateful? We shall see.
One day when the summer term was about a month old a very dreary game of cricket was pursuing its slow course in third game. The infants concerned in it were sleepily watching the efforts of one after another of their number to bowl Corkery Minimus. Corkery was not, as cricket is considered at Lord’s, a great cricketer, but he was a stolid, phlegmatic youth, too big for third game and too lazy to wake up and so push forward into second. He stood stolidly at his wicket, making a run or two occasionally in order to poach the bowling. Jeremy was sitting in the pavilion, his cap tilted forward over his eyes, nearly asleep, and praying that Corkery might stay in all the afternoon and so save him from batting. One of the younger masters, Newsom, a youth fresh from Cambridge, was presiding over the afternoon and longing for six o’clock.
