If Lord Trimingham really suspected Marian of being too friendly with Ted, what would happen when she persuaded him not to join the Army, as she certainly would? “It’s not what I want, it’s what she wants,” Ted had said; “she has the say-so.” Marian had said that Ted was dangerous. I didn’t think he was, because he had been so mild when I last saw him, but I knew how hot-tempered he could be, and egged on by Marian, he might—
This was the point of greatest danger, the point where the paths of the ninth Viscount and the fifth converged.
As a theory it appealed more to my fears than to my mind. Although I had an exaggerated idea of the rights of landlords, I didn’t think Lord Trimingham could legally compel Ted to join up, nor did I think he would call him out, as his ancestor had done in the same circumstances.
The more I studied the problem and the unknown factors in it, the more abstract did it become; the persons of the drama began to lose their dimensions and be elongated into the familiar lines AB, BC, CA.
But Ted less than the others. I knew exactly what Lord Trimingham wanted. He was a constant: he wanted to marry Marian. I knew what Marian wanted, or what she intended, which was not the same thing: to marry Lord Trimingham and keep Ted by her. And what did Ted want? What she wanted, he had said, but I doubted it. He was much the most impulsive of the three, as I had cause to know. Sometimes he felt like it, to use his own phrase; sometimes he didn’t. Whereas they always felt like it. It now occurred to me that when he heard that Marian and Lord Trimingham were engaged, he didn’t feel like it, and tentatively revised his previous answer to his landlord about joining up.
I feared for Lord Trimingham, I wept with Marian, but for Ted I grieved. Only he, it seemed to me, had a real life out-side the problem, a life unconnected with it to which he was always reaching. Into that other life he admitted me as a real person, not only as an errand boy who must be petted or scolded to make him function. Perhaps this was unfair to Marian and Lord Trimingham, who had both treated me with signal kindness. But to them, I knew, I was a go-between; they thought of me in terms of another person. When Lord Trimingham wanted Marian, when Marian wanted Ted, they turned to me. The confidences that Marian had made me had been forced out of her. With Ted it was different. He felt he owed me something—me, Leo: the tribute of one nature to another.
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 sub-side, 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 one-self 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.:
Four candles (for combustion)
One mettle container (silver)
1 perferated utensil
Four books (small) for supporting the last named
Four boxes of matches
Water for boiling
Watch for timing
Wet sponge in case of fire
The metal container was a cup my mother had given me; it was one of a series, graduated in size, which fitted into one another and so took up only a small space. They were of silver, gilt-washed inside, and had been given to Mother as a wedding present. They were meant for picnics and she hoped I should use mine for this purpose on my visit, though actually I never did, for there were always plenty of glasses. She also believed, I suspect, that the cup would be a mark of gentility, showing that I came from a good home. As an alembic it was almost perfect, being egg-shell thin.
The perforated utensil on which, more than on anything else, the success of my spell depended was the drainer from the soap-dish on my washstand, a white enamelled makeshift that did not match the set. It had a large hole in the middle and other holes all round through which, I thought, the candle flames would find their way; supported by the books, it would make a kind of tripod.
Then having arrived and having reduced the ingredients in the cup to a mash or pulp, to add water, but not too much, as this will require longer to boil. Boiling takes place when bubbling begins (212° Fahr.). This should be at midnight, and at the same time chant the spell (words of spell to be supplied later) thirteen times backwards, thirteen times forwards, saying: “And I am thirteen too,” not so loud as to be heard in the passage but loud enough for someone listening in the room to hear; and if the magician sweats, to add some drops of his own sweat, for this is most effective.
The Go-Between Page 27