The Go-Between (36 page)

  I did not like to think of him giving up the things
he cared for and sleeping on the ground. I could not believe that
it was softer than the beds at Brandham. Besides, he might be
killed. There was a lot of him to be killed, and what there was he
carried about with him, it was not spread out over houses and
parklands.

  Who had started it all, I wondered, whose fault was
it? This was not an inquiry I found sympathetic. It might bring sin
in, and I wanted to keep sin out: sin was undiscriminating and
reduced to a uniform shade of grey many fine actions that might
otherwise have been called Golden Deeds.

  Still, whose fault was it? “Nothing is ever a lady’s
fault,” Lord Trimingham had said, thereby ruling Marian out, and I
was glad, for now I had no wish to inculpate her. He had not said:
“Nothing is ever a lord’s fault,” but no one could hold him to
blame: he had done nothing that he shouldn’t; I was clear about
that. Nor had he said: “Nothing is ever a farmer’s fault,” and
lacking the benefit of this saving clause the fault, if fault there
were, must lie with Ted. Ted had enticed Marian into his parlour,
his kitchen, and bewitched her. He had cast a spell on her. That
spell I would now break—as much for his sake as for hers.

  But how?

  I had taken a first step by falsifying the time of
his appointment. Marian would not find him in the outhouse at six
o’clock; and would she wait a whole half-hour for him? I doubted
it; I relied on the impatience that was one of her most obvious
characteristics. She could not wait. She could not wait to hear an
explanation; she could not wait for one to finish a sentence; the
boredom of waiting upset her physically. Two minutes’ grace, I was
sure, would be the utmost she would give to Ted; and in the
exasperation of waiting her feelings for him might alter. To keep a
grown-up person waiting was a serious offence, even among
themselves. She might be angry with him, for she could be angry as
well as he. “I’ll never come again! I’ll never come again!” And
Ted: “Well, if you waited for me, so have I waited for you, and a
lot longer too, and I’m a busy man, and it’s harvest-time.” “Pooh!
You’re only a farmer, it doesn’t matter keeping farmers waiting.”
“Oh, I’m only a farmer, am I? Well, we’ll see,” etc., etc.

  I pictured quite a pretty quarrel between
them—reproaches, recriminations, and finally rupture, all growing
out of the seed of distrust I’d sown. And then the situation would
subside, like a pricked gathering on one’s finger.

  How much happier we should have been, I reflected,
if the situation had never arisen! Not Lord Trimingham, he was
happy, but only because he was kept in ignorance. But Marian, Ted,
and myself, Leo Colston; what had we got out of it to compensate us
for what we had lost? We had reached, all three of us, a point when
everything that happened, however distantly related, however
apparently unconnected, only mattered in so far as it helped, or
hindered, Marian’s meetings with Ted. These meetings had come to
dominate our lives; nothing else really counted. Why did Marian
loathe London, or say she did? Why did Ted feel obliged to give up
farming, which he loved, for soldiering in South Africa, which he
hated? Why had I been reduced to trying to get myself recalled from
Brandham Hall, where I had been so happy? In each case the answer
was the same: the Marian-Ted relationship.

  How everything else had been diminished by it and
drained of quality!—for it was a standard of comparison that
dwarfed other things. Its colours were brighter, its voice was
louder, its power of attraction infinitely greater. It was a
parasite of the emotions. Nothing else could live with it or have
an independent existence while it was there. It created a desert,
it wouldn’t share with anyone or anything, it wanted all the
attention for itself. And being a secret, it contributed nothing to
our daily life; it could no more be discussed than could some
shameful illness.

  I did not know it by the name of passion. I did not
understand the nature of the bond that drew the two together; but I
understood its workings very well. I knew what they would give for
it and give up for it; I knew how far they would go—I knew there
were no lengths they would not go to. I realized they got something
out of it I could not get; I did not realize that I was jealous of
it, jealous of whatever it was they gave each other, and did not
give me. But though experience could not tell me what it was, my
instincts were beginning to have a clue.

  What an Eden Brandham Hall had been before this
serpent entered it! I fell to reconstructing my visit as it might
have been if I had never slid down Ted Burgess’s straw-stack. Some
facts I suppressed, others I distorted, others I magnified. There
would have been no ridicule, no making fun of me: every day would
have been a high-light, like the shopping expedition to Norwich,
like my catch at the cricket match, like my song at the concert. I
should have been infinitely valued and esteemed, but at the same
time I should have been perfectly free to go my own way; the
affection showered on me would have imposed no obligations. I could
not conceal from myself the fact that this sun of the twentieth
century, of which I had such high hopes, had shone on me: even
today, which seemed a chilly, disappointing day after yesterday,
the thermometer had climbed to nearly eighty-one degrees. But I
should have enjoyed it, so I told myself, in a different spirit, in
a mood of continuous, conscious lyricism. In the windless stillness
in which I wandered and wondered, everything I saw would have
ministered to my happiness; everything would have had its proper
quality and spoken to me of itself. The flowers, the trees, the
house, the distant views, would have had the same value to my
physical eye as they had to the eye of contemplation; the
separateness, the distance between them, the air of existing only
for themselves and me, which I demanded for the realization of my
Golden Age, would have been my private, undisturbed possession. And
so with the figures of the landscape. From Mrs. Maudsley downwards
(for I put her first) I should have come to know and love them in
the unique splendour of their separate entities, stars of varying
magnitudes, but each with its appointed place in the heavens, and
each worshipful.

  Instead, my orbit had contracted in proportion as my
rate of progress had increased; until I was now dizzily whirling
round a tiny flaming nucleus like a naphtha flare in a street
market, impenetrable darkness round me, my sole prospect my own
imminent destruction.

  Il faut en finir, as Marcus might have said, il faut
en finir.

  But what spell could I employ to break the spell
that Ted had cast on Marian?

  I had no knowledge of black magic and relied on the
inspiration of the moment. If while concocting the spell I could
excite myself and frighten myself, I felt it had a better chance of
success. If also I had the sense of something giving way, inside me
and outside, that was still better. The spell that had brought
about the downfall of Jenkins and Strode had fulfilled all these
conditions.

  But those were spells whose operation was confined
to the world of my experience, the schoolboy world. I had never
launched a spell against a grown-up person. Not only were my
present victims grown-ups; they belonged to the world from which my
spells derived their power; I should be trying to turn their own
weapons against them.

  But I must not think of them as victims. This I told
myself over and over again, and I still do. They would not suffer
at all. The other spell, Ted’s spell, would be destroyed, but they
would not be harmed. Afterwards, as in
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream
, they might not even be able to recognize each other.
“Who is that man over there?” Marian might ask me. “I seem to know
him and yet I don’t.... Oh, he’s a
farmer
? Then I don’t
think I want to know him.” So ran one dialogue, and another ran:
“Who is that lady, Master Colston? I thought I knew her, and yet I
don’t. She’s pretty, isn’t she?” “Oh, don’t you know? That’s Miss
Maudsley, Miss Marian Maudsley.” “Oh, is it, indeed? Then she’s not
for the likes of me.”

  Or perhaps they would be invisible to each other:
that would be still more thrilling. In any case, order would have
been restored: social order, universal order; and Puck or whoever
he is who has produced this miracle will vanish gracefully from the
scene.

  The spell must be something that would tax me to the
utmost, involve me in doing something that I dreaded; and it must
have a symbolical appropriateness, too.

  The idea came to me while I was talking to Marcus,
and I don’t think he noticed any change in my expression.

  I put on my bedroom slippers, and my brown Jaeger
dressing-gown over my nightshirt, and crept down the staircase—
careful to take the left-hand flight, whose turn it was, for in an
enterprise of this sort every formality must be observed. Through
the closed door of the drawing-room came sounds of singing. Often
there was singing after dinner, I knew; but we were not allowed to
sit up for it. Marian was at the piano, I recognized her touch; and
the singer must be the man who had come down from London with her.
He had a good tenor voice, much more even than Ted’s, but not
altogether unlike it. I knew the song: it was called “The
Thorn”:

     
From the white-blossomed
sloe

     
My dear Chloe
requested

     
A sprig her fair breast to
adorn....

     
No, by Heaven, I
exclaimed,

     
May I perish

     
If ever I plant in that bosom
a thorn.

  I had never quite understood what the song meant,
but it appealed to some of my strongest feelings. Why was the lady
(or woman, as Marcus had warned me to call her, but I was always
forgetting that) afraid that some jealous rival might laugh her to
scorn? I did not know, but I sympathized with her, for I knew how
unpleasant it was to be laughed at in that way. And I
sympathized—how deeply I sympathized!—with the lover’s resolve to
devote himself to death rather than expose her to such an
insult.

  After the song came a little desultory clapping,
muffled and faint compared with the applause that had greeted my
songs in the village hall; then silence.

  The front door stood open to the night; it had been
left open every night since I arrived, except the first, to keep
the house cool. But it wasn’t cool; under my Jaeger dressing-gown I
was sweating.

  I stared at the tall oblong of darkness in front of
me. Behind me the hall, lit here and there by oil lamps, ended in
darkness too. But under the drawing-room door a sliver of quite
bright light glowed, and lay wedge-shaped upon the floor. What
would happen, what would they say, if I pushed the door open and
went in and said to Mrs. Maudsley: “I’m still awake—can I listen to
the music?”

  I dared not do it, yet I nearly did it, so strong
was my shrinking from what lay before me. I tried to leave my
moorings, I set my face towards the darkness outside and got as far
as the threshold, but I couldn’t cross it. The future was like a
wall in front of me, impenetrable to thought.

  I turned back to the hall. The presences the other
side of the drawing-room door were a comfort to me; they did not
know that I was there, but they were like spectators at the
quayside who wave to the ship as it goes out, and cheer the lonely
passenger, even if their farewells are not for him.

  I found that by moving close to the drawing-room
door, touching it, I could hear something of what was being said
inside. They were discussing what the next song should be, “In the
Gloaming,” or “Kathleen Mavourneen.” Someone said: “Let’s have
both,” and perhaps I should have stayed to listen to them, for they
were favourite songs of mine, and then crept back to bed. But my
wretched habit of wriggling overcame me: I made a noise and someone
within was asked to go and investigate—Denys, I think. I heard
footsteps coming across the floor, and fled.

  It was as dark as I expected it would be, but much
less difficult to find my way. That I might lose myself had been
one of my chief fears—my chief practical fears. Another still
haunted me and grew with every step I took: that they would have
shut and locked the front door before I got back. Then I should
have to stay outside till morning, and try to sleep on the
ground.

  The night was not only a strange world to me; it was
a forbidden world. Little boys had no business to be about at
night; the night was for grown-ups, and bad grown-ups too: thieves,
murderers, and such.

  But what I was going to do had to be done at night
or it would lose its virtue. I had persuaded myself of that: the
very fear it inspired in me convinced me.

  I sped along between the rhododendrons, keeping my
thoughts at bay, and passing one by one the landmarks at which (I
had promised myself) I would turn back if my terrors became
unbearable. I had bribed them in this fashion before I left my
bedroom.

  As I went along I rehearsed what I meant to do, for
I knew how easy it is, in the excitement of doing something for the
first time, to forget the proper way to do it, the separate stages
and which follows which. More than once I had known perfectly, in
theory, how to do a chemistry experiment, but when confronted by
the Bunsen burner and the tube and all the rest of it, so different
in reality from what they had been in thought, I had lost my head
and made a mess of it.

  This, too, was to be a chemistry experiment, and one
of the conditions had already been complied with: it was to be done
at night; preferably by moonlight, preferably during an eclipse,
but anyhow at night. First, the ingredients must be gathered. A
single berry would be sufficient for my purpose, but as every part
of the plant was poisonous, it would be more effective if every
part of the plant was used: leaf, stem, flower, berry, and root. To
obtain a specimen of the last-named might not be easy, as the root
might be some distance underground, so it was advised to provide
oneself with a pocket-knife fitted with a stout blade, for the
purpose of paring off a portion of the root. No trowel or spade
being available, this must be done by the fingers, digging out the
earth at the plant’s base, the head of course coming into contact
with the lower branches (this was a contact that I specially
dreaded). The desired length of root, having been cut off, would
then be placed in the dressing-gown pocket or other convenient
receptacle, care being taken to touch none of the ingredients with
the lips, as every part of the plant is poisonous. (N.B. If this
can be done while holding the breath it will be more effective.)
The whole to be carried at a fast trot and without stopping to the
magician’s bedchamber, where other utensils must be held in
readiness, viz.: