The Go-Between (5 page)

  One act of consideration, however, my room-mates
showed me and I still remember it with gratitude. It was our custom
to talk for some few minutes after lights out, simply because to do
so was against the rules; and if any of the five failed to join in
he was pointedly reminded of it and told he was a funk, and letting
down the good name of the dorm. Whether my sobs were audible I
don’t know, but I dared not trust my voice to speak, and nobody
censured my silence.

  The next day at break I wandered about by myself,
keeping close to the wall, for there, at any rate, I could not be
surrounded. I was keeping a weather eye open for the gang (where
there had been nobody, suddenly there were six) when a boy I hardly
knew came up with an odd look on his face and said:

  “Have you heard the news?”

  “What news?” I had hardly spoken to anybody.

  “About Jenkins and Strode.” He looked at me
narrowly.

  “What is it?”

  “They were out on the roofs last night and Jenkins
slipped and Strode tried to hold him but he couldn’t and was pulled
off too. They’re both in the San with concussion of the brain and
their people have been sent for. Jenkins’s mater and pater have
just arrived. They came in a cab with the blinds drawn down and
Jenkins’s mater is in black already. I thought you might be
interested.”

  I said nothing and the boy, with a backward glance
at me, went off whistling. I felt faint and didn’t recognize
myself: it was so extraordinary not to be afraid of the gang any
more. But I was afraid—afraid of what they might do to me in case I
was a murderer. The bell went and I began to walk towards the door
in the corner, and two of the boys in my dorm came up and shook
hands with me and said “Congrats” with respect in their faces. So
then I knew it was all right.

  Afterwards I was quite a hero, for nobody, it turned
out, had much liking for Jenkins and Strode, though nobody had
raised a finger to stop them ragging me. Even their four chums who
used to help them to knock me about said they only did it because
Jenkins and Strode made them. Jenkins and Strode had told everyone
about the curses, meaning to make a fool of me, and what the whole
school wanted to know was: did I mean to use the third curse? Even
the boys in the top classroom spoke to me about this. It was
generally agreed that it would be more sporting not to, but that I
should be quite within my rights if I did: “Those chaps want a
lesson,” the head of the school told me. However, I didn’t use it.
I was secretly terrified at what I had done, and if it hadn’t been
for the current of public opinion running my way I might easily
have got into a morbid state about it. As it was, I devised a
number of spells intended to make the victims recover, but these I
did not enter in my diary, partly because they would have detracted
from the sense of utter triumph I was being encouraged to feel, and
partly because if they failed, my public reputation as a magician
would have suffered. Nor would it have been a popular move; for
during the few days that the boys’ lives hung in the balance, we
all went about in a subdued manner with long faces, but secretly
hoping for the worst. Ghoulish reports—faces under sheets, parents
in tears —were circulated, and the mood of tension and crisis
demanded an outlet in catastrophe. Of this it was cheated, but very
gradually; and during the drawn-out anticlimax I received many
rather rueful congratulations on my forbearance in not having
launched the third curse, which most of the boys, including in
certain moods myself, believed would have been fatal.

  “Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?”
No, I was not; I had come through with flying colours. I was the
hero of the hour, and though my vogue did not last long at that
high level, I never quite lost it. I became a recognized authority
on two subjects dear to the hearts of most boys at that time: black
magic and code-making, and I was frequently consulted on both these
subjects. I even made a little out of it, charging threepence a
time for my advice, which I gave only after certain necromantic
formalities had been gone through, passwords exchanged, and so on.
I also invented a language and had the delirious pleasure, for a
few days, of hearing it used round me. It consisted, if I remember,
in making the syllable “ski” alternately the prefix and suffix of
each word in a sentence, thus: “Skihave youski skidone yourski
skiprep?” It was considered very funny, so I got a reputation as a
wag as well. And also as a master of language. I was no longer made
fun of if I used long words; on the contrary they were expected of
me; the diary became a quarry for synonyms of the most ambitious
kind. It was then that I began to cherish a dream of becoming a
writer—perhaps the greatest writer of the greatest century, the
twentieth. I had no idea what I wanted to write about, but I
composed sentences that I thought would look well and sound well in
print; that my writing should achieve the status of print was my
ambition, and I thought of a writer as someone whose work fulfilled
print’s requirements.

  One question was often put to me, but I never
answered it: what exactly was the meaning of the curses that had
literally brought about the downfall of Jenkins and Strode? How did
I translate them? I didn’t, of course, myself know what they meant.
I could easily have produced a translation, but I felt for several
reasons it would be wiser not to. Kept secret, they would still
minister to my prestige; revealed, and used by irresponsible
people, who knew what harm they might do? They might even be turned
against me. Meanwhile a good deal of private curse-making went on:
strips of paper covered with cabalistic signs were passed from hand
to hand. But though their authors sometimes claimed to have
obtained results, nothing happened to challenge the supremacy of
mine.

  “Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?”
No, I was not; I had won, and my victory, though its methods were
unorthodox, had fulfilled the chief requirement of our code: I had
won it by myself, or at any rate without calling in the help of any
human agency. There had been no sneaking. Also, I had kept within
the traditional terms of schoolboy experience—so fantastic in some
ways, so matter-of-fact in others. The curses were not really a
shot in the dark, though their outcome had been so sensational.
They were aimed at the su-perstitiousness that I instinctively knew
my schoolfellows possessed. I had been a realist, I had somehow
sized up the situation and solved it with the means at my command,
and I enjoyed a realist’s reward. If I had looked on Southdown Hill
School as being in some way an adjunct of the twentieth century, or
as being intimately related to the zodiac—a hierarchy of glorious,
perfected beings slowly ascending into the ether —what a cropper I
should have come.

  With an effort I took up the diary again and turned
the closely written pages, so buoyant with success. February,
March, April—with April the entries fell off, for it was the
holidays— May full up again and the first half of June. Again the
dearth of entries and I was in July. Under Monday 9th I had written
“Brandham Hall.” A list of names followed, the names of my fellow
guests, and then: “Tuesday 10th. 84.7 degrees.” Each day after that
I had recorded the maximum temperature and much else, until:
“Thursday 26th. 80.7 degrees.”

  This was the last entry in July, and the last entry
in the diary. I did not have to turn the pages to know they would
be blank.

  It was eleven five, five minutes later than my
habitual bedtime. I felt guilty at being still up, but the past
kept pricking at me and I knew that all the events of those
nineteen days in July were astir within me, like the loosening
phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up. I had kept
them buried all these years, but they were there, I knew, the more
complete, the more unforgotten, for being carefully embalmed.
Never, never had they seen the light of day; the slightest stirring
had been stifled with a scattering of earth.

  My secret—the explanation of me—lay there. I take
myself much too seriously, of course. What does it matter to anyone
what I was like, then or now? But every man is important to himself
at one time or another; my problem had been to reduce the
importance, and spread it out as thinly as I could over half a
century. Thanks to my interment policy, I had come to terms with
life, I had made a working—working was the word—arrangement with
it, on the one condition that there should be no exhumation. Was it
true, what I sometimes told myself, that my best energies had been
given to the undertaker’s art? If it was, what did it matter?
Should I have acquitted myself better, with the knowledge I had
now? I doubted it; knowledge may be power, but it is not
resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less
is it instinctive sympathy with human nature; and those were
qualities I possessed in 1900 in far greater measure than I possess
them in 1952.

  If Brandham Hall had been Southdown Hill School, I
should have known how to deal with it. I understood my
schoolfellows, they were no larger than life to me. I did not
understand the world of Brandham Hall; the people there were much
larger than life; their meaning was as obscure to me as the meaning
of the curses I had called down on Jenkins and Strode; they had
zodiacal properties and proportions. They were, in fact, the
substance of my dreams, the realization of my hopes; they were the
incarnated glory of the twentieth century; I could no more have
been indifferent to them than after fifty years the steel could be
indifferent to the magnets in my collar-box.

  If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown
rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: “Why have you
grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why
have you spent your time in dusty libraries, cataloguing other
people’s books instead of writing your own? What has become of the
Ram, the Bull, and the Lion, the examples I gave you to emulate?
Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and long
curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you”—what should I say?

  I should have an answer ready. “Well, it was you who
let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun,
and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made
me.”

  To which he might reply: “But you have had half a
century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century,
that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!”

  “Has the twentieth century,” I should ask, “done so
much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is
dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past,
if you haven’t missed it—ask yourself whether you found everything
so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has
fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were
vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you
hoped so much of.”

  “But you might have tried. You needn’t have run
away. I didn’t run away from Jenkins and Strode, I overcame them.
Not at once, of course. I went to a private place and I thought
about them a great deal; they were very real to me, I can tell you.
I can still remember what they looked like. Then I took action.
They were my enemies. I called down curses on them, and they fell
off the roof and had concussions. Then I wasn’t bothered with them
any more. I didn’t mind thinking about them a bit; I don’t now. Did
you take any action? Did you call down curses?”

  “That,” said I, “was for you to do, and you didn’t
do it.”

  “But I did—I cast a spell.”

  “What good was a spell when it was curses that were
needed? You didn’t want to injure them, Mrs. Maudsley or her
daughter or Ted Burgess or Trimingham. You wouldn’t admit that they
had injured you, you wouldn’t think of them as enemies. You
insisted on thinking of them as angels, even if they were fallen
angels. They belonged to your zodiac. ‘If you can’t think of them
kindly, don’t think of them at all. For your own sake, don’t think
of them.’ That was your parting charge to me, and I have kept it.
Perhaps they have gone bad on me. I didn’t think of them because I
couldn’t think of them kindly, or kindly of myself in relation to
them. There was very little kindness in the whole business, I
assure you, and if you had realized that and called down curses,
instead of entreating me, with your dying breath, to think about
them kindly—”

  “Try now, try now, it isn’t too late.”

  The voice died away. But it had done its work. I
was
thinking of them. The cerements, the coffins, the
vaults, all that had confined them was bursting open, and I should
have to face it, I
was
facing it, the scene, the people,
and the experience. Excitement, like hysteria, bubbled up in me
from a hundred unsealed springs. If it isn’t too late, I thought
confusedly, neither is it too early: I haven’t much life left to
spoil. It was a last flicker of the instinct of self-preservation
which had failed me so signally at Brandham Hall.

  The clock struck twelve. Round me were ranged the
piles of papers, dingy white and with indented outlines like the
cliffs of Thanet. “Under those cliffs,” I thought, “I have been
buried.” But they should witness my resurrection, the resurrection
that had begun in the red collar-box, whose contents were still
strewn about it. I picked up the lock and looked at it again. What
was the combination of letters that had opened it? I might have
guessed without troubling to put myself into a trance: egotism
might have prompted me. I said it aloud to myself wonderingly; for
many years it had been only a written word. It was my own name,
LEO.