“That Marian’s going to change.”
“If it’s a secret, why tell it?”
Denys subsided, but it was Marcus who had given the show away, not he.
“She may not have waited for the carriage,” someone said, “and be walking up in the rain. She’ll have to change then, poor darling, she’ll be soaked.”
“What a kind-hearted daughter you have, Mrs. Maudsley,” said another guest. “It isn’t every girl who would be so good to her old nannie.”
“Marian was always very fond of her,” Mrs. Maudsley said. “Now, Leo, blow those candles out before they set fire to anything, and then light yours. And have you still room for a bit of your own special cake?”
I rose to do her bidding, and the room was soon filled with the sound of puffing. Slender as they were, the candles did not take extinction easily, and I was rather breathless before I began to blow. But stronger and fresher lungs lent me their aid.
“Oh, pinch them, pinch them! Lick your fingers first!”
At last the smouldering wicks were extinguished. I lit my one candle and cut myself a piece of my little cake; but I couldn’t swallow it.
“He’d rather have his cake than eat it,” someone said.
There was a pause; during the last few minutes, I noticed, every action and almost every remark had been followed by a pause.
“She should be here any minute now,” Lord Trimingham said. No one questioned this.
“Let’s have a round of crackers,” suggested Mr. Maudsley. “Here, Leo, come and pull one with me.”
Everyone found a partner; some their next-door neighbours, some their opposite numbers. Several of the ladies screwed their faces up and held their heads back; one or two brave spirits seized the cardboard strip.
“Now all together!”
The detonations were splendid and prolonged. They joined with the thunder outside to produce a terrific salvo; and I think only my ears caught the sound of carriage wheels as they rolled past the windows.
Caps were put on, dunces’ caps, forage caps, Roman helmets, crowns; tin whistles shrilled, languishing voices chanted sentimental rhymes. “Another round, another round!” Everyone began to search among the debris for unused crackers; soon we were all rearmed and confronting each other with flushed, challenging faces. This time my cracker-partner was Mrs. Maudsley. She bent her head and compressed her lips.
“Leave one for Marian!” someone cried.
Again the detonations, the tearing paper, the smoke, the acrid fumes. When sounds and smells had died away and laughter was beginning, I saw the butler standing at Mrs. Maudsley’s elbow.
“Excuse me, madam,” he said, “the carriage has come back, but not Miss Marian. She wasn’t at Miss Robson’s, and Miss Robson said she hadn’t been all day.”
This piece of news dismayed me just as much as if I had not been expecting it. Perhaps I was not expecting it: perhaps I had persuaded myself that Marian would be there. My insides began to revolt anew against my birthday tea. Across the table, under the caps, which always made grown-ups seem still older than they were, the shining eyes, the faces, dark red in the lamplight, had a wild, hobgoblin look. They reminded me of the pictures in the smoking-room—they had forgotten themselves.
“Where can she be?” asked someone, but not as if it mattered.
“Yes, where can she be?”
“She’s got to change. She may be changing now. She may be upstairs changing,” Denys said.
“Well, all we can do is to wait for her,” said Mr. Maudsley equably.
Cap nodded at cap sagely, whistles began to blow, and a man was starting to read a riddle, shouting to make himself heard, when all at once Mrs. Maudsley pushed her chair back and stood up. Her elbows were sticking out, her body was bent and trembling, and her face unrecognizable.
“No,” she said. “We won’t wait. I’m going to look for her. Leo, you know where she is; you shall show me the way.”
Before I knew what was happening, she had swept me from the room, as much by the authority of her voice and manner as by her hand, which, I think, touched my shoulder. “Madeleine!” her husband’s voice called after her; it was the only time I ever heard him call her by name.
As we passed through the hall my eyes caught sight of the green bicycle, and in an instant it was photographed on my mind. It was propped against the newel-post of the staircase and somehow reminded me of a little mountain sheep with curly horns, its head lowered in apology or defence. The handlebars, turned towards me, were dwarfed by the great height of the saddle, which, pulled out to its fullest extent for Marian to ride, disclosed a shining tube of steel six inches long.
The vision remained with me, imparting a distressing sense of something misshapen and misused, as I ran through the rain at Mrs. Maudsley’s side. I did not know that she could run at all, but I could hardly keep up with her, she ran so fast. Her lilac paper bonnet was soon soaked through; it flapped dismally as she ran, then clung to her head, dark and transparent, while the water dripped off the strings. I felt the rain oozing through my dunce’s cap, cooling my head and coursing down my back.
Actually the rain was less heavy than it had been, the thunder was more distant and the lightning, instead of darting ice-blue from black clouds, wriggled slowly, an orange trickle, down a primrose-coloured sky. I was too frightened to mind the storm, though it increased my wretchedness; what I was most aware of—outside my misery—was the indescribable smell of rain filling the air.
Mrs. Maudsley said nothing, but ran with wide, awkward steps, her skirt with its three rows of braid dragging at the gravel and swishing through the puddles, and soon I realized that it was she who was guiding me; she knew where we were going. When we came to the cinder path between the rhododendrons I tried to turn her back. I cried: “Not this way, Mrs. Maudsley.” But she paid no heed to me and plunged blindly on, until we came to the outhouse where the deadly night-shade had been. The tousle-headed stump was still lying on the path, limp and bedraggled. She stopped and peered inside at the leaves, wet but already withering. “Not here,” she said, “but here, perhaps, or here. You said there were poachers.” Not a sound came from the forlorn row of huts, only the rain pattering on their battered roofs. I could not bear to aid her in her search and shrank back, crying. “No, you shall come,” she said, and seized my hand, and it was then that we saw them, together on the ground, the Virgin and the Water-carrier, two bodies moving like one. I think I was more mystified than horrified; it was Mrs. Maudsley’s repeated screams that frightened me, and a shadow on the wall that opened and closed like an umbrella.
I remember very little more, but somehow it got through to me, while I was still at Brandham Hall, that Ted Burgess had gone home and shot himself.
EPILOGUE
WHEN I PUT down my pen, I meant to put away my memories with it. They had had days, weeks, months to settle, but in the end they didn’t, and that is how I came to write this epilogue.
During my breakdown I was like a train going through a series of tunnels; sometimes in the daylight; sometimes in the dark, sometimes knowing who and where I was, sometimes not knowing. Little by little the periods of daylight grew more continuous and at last I was running in the open; by the middle of September I was considered fit to go back to school.
I didn’t recover my memory of what happened at Brandham, however, after the revelation in the outhouse. That, like my coming home, remained a blank. I didn’t remember it and I didn’t want to. The doctor said it would be good for me to unburden myself, and my mother tried to make me, but I wouldn’t have told her if I could. When she volunteered to tell me what she knew, I shouted at her to stop; and I have never known how much she did know. “But you have nothing to be ashamed of,” she would say; “nothing at all, my darling. Besides, it’s all over now.”
But I didn’t believe her, and the capacity for disbelief, so difficult to acquire, is equally difficult to eradicate. I didn’t believe it was all over and I didn’t believ
e that I had nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I had everything to be ashamed of. I had betrayed them all—Lord Trimingham, Ted, Marian, the whole Maudsley family, who had welcomed me into their midst. Just what the consequences had been I neither knew nor wished to know; I judged their seriousness by Mrs. Maudsley’s screams, which were the last sounds heard by my conscious ear—for the tidings of Ted’s suicide came to me voicelessly, like a communication in a dream.
His fate I did know, and it was for him I grieved. He haunted me. Not only in the most dreadful way, by his blood and brains stuck to the kitchen walls, but by a persistent picture of him cleaning his gun. The idea that he had cleaned it to shoot himself with was a special torment to me; of all the thoughts he might have had while cleaning it, the thought that he was going to use it against himself must have been the one farthest from his mind. The irony of this was like an arrow in my spirit.
It did not occur to me that they had treated me badly. I did not know how to draw up an indictment against a grown-up person. A certain set of circumstances had arisen and it was for me to deal with them, just as at school I had had to deal with the persecution of Jenkins and Strode. Then I had succeeded; I had turned their taunt of “vanquished” against them. This time I had failed: it was I who was vanquished, and forever.
At school a spell had saved me; and at Brandham, too, I had resorted to a spell. The spell had worked: I couldn’t deny that. It had broken off the relationship between Ted and Marian, from whose continuance I had foreseen such direful consequences. It had uprooted the belladonna, and blasted it in Ted’s very arms. But it had recoiled on me. In destroying the belladonna I had also destroyed Ted, and perhaps destroyed myself. Was it really a moment of triumph when I lay prostrate on the ground, and the uplifted root rained down earth on me?
I saw myself entering Ted’s life, an unknown small boy, a visitant from afar, sliding down his straw-stack; and it seemed to me that from that moment he was doomed. And so was I—our fates were linked together. I could not injure him without injuring myself.
Yes, the supernatural powers I had invoked had punished my presumption. And why had they, when at school they had so clearly been on my side? The reason was, I told myself, that at Brandham Hall I had invoked these powers against each other, had tried to set the Zodiac against itself. In my eyes the actors in my drama had been immortals, inheritors of the summer and of the coming glory of the twentieth century.
So whichever way I looked, towards the world of experience or the world of the imagination, my gaze returned to me empty. I could make no contact with either, and lacking the nourishment that these umbilical cords convey, I shrank into myself.
When Marcus and I met again at school we met almost as strangers. We were polite and distant with each other; we never went for walks together and never alluded to the past. No one commented on this; at school friendships were always being made and broken. I found new friends to go about with, but into these friendships I put little of myself—indeed, there was little left to put. But my daily glimpses of Marcus, reminding me of the need for secrecy, were like hammer-taps nailing me up. Gradually my active dread of hearing anything about Brandham passed into indifference, a progressive atrophy of curiosity about people that extended in many directions—in fact, in nearly all. But another world came to my aid: the world of facts. I accumulated facts: facts that existed independently of me, facts that my private wishes could not add to or subtract from. Soon I came to regard these facts as truths, and the only truths I cared to recognize. Pascal would have condemned them as being truth without charity; they contributed little to experience or imagination, but gradually took the place of both. Indeed, the life of facts proved no bad substitute for the facts of life. It did not let me down; on the contrary it upheld me and probably saved my life; for when the First World War came, my skill in marshalling facts was held to be more important than any service I was likely to perform on the field. So I missed that experience, along with many others, spooning among them. Ted hadn’t told me what it was, but he had shown me, he had paid with his life for showing me, and after that I never felt like it.
Many records came to light besides those hidden in the collar-box. My mother and I were both inveterate hoarders; I had kept all her letters, she all mine; it was only a matter of time before I found our Brandham correspondence. Among the letters was an envelope, sealed down but unaddressed. What was it? Then in a flash I guessed: it was the letter Marian had given me for Ted on the afternoon of my birthday. In equal measure I wanted to open it and not to open it. Eventually I compromised by keeping it beside me, a prize to be opened only when I had finished.
My acquired respect for facts bore fruit, enabling me to lay some unction to my soul which at the time I had denied myself. Thus it became clear to me—chronology proved it—that Marian had been quite fond of me before there was any question of my acting as go-between. Afterwards she had redoubled her favours, making up to me and stuffing me with lies; but the episode of the green suit came first. I saw now, what I did not take in then, that her chief object in going to Norwich was to meet Ted Burgess: his must have been the raised hat on the other side of the square. But it would be unduly cynical to say I was only a pretext for her journey. It would have been such an expensive pretext, for one thing—not that she minded about money. I felt pretty sure that she was genuinely concerned about my permanently overheated state and wanted to do me a good turn. Inexplicable as it seemed to me now, the conviction that she had never really cared for me had been the bitterest of the pills I had to swallow. Similarly Lord Trimingham’s affability and condescension, on which I had set so much store, did not altogether proceed from the wish that I should be a convenient link between him and Marian. Ted’s behaviour had been more suspect. What a change there had been in his demeanour when I told him I was a visitor at the Hall! And how he had alternately cajoled and threatened me when I began to jib at taking the messages! And yet he had been really sorry about it; he had even said he was sorry, as a good child should. Perhaps among all of us—and that went for me, too—he was the only one who had had a true impulse of contrition.
I was able to winnow out other facts that had been hidden from me at the time. Marcus it must have been who told his mother that I knew something of Marian’s whereabouts when she gave out that she was with her old nannie; he had goaded me, by his superior knowledge of French, into making that silly and disastrous boast. I had assumed that all schoolboys obeyed the “no sneaking” rule as implicitly as I did—as Marcus himself did as long as he was at school. It hadn’t occurred to me that just as we changed our language and vocabulary when we went into polite society, so we changed our natures—or at least our expression of them.
And I, I was not so guilty as I believed myself to be in the long months that followed my visit, or so blameless as, in the years that followed them, I had come to think I was. I had come to blame the visit for everything, even for my vice of taking myself too seriously. I ought not to have read Marian’s note; I ought not to have falsified the hour of Marian’s rendezvous with Ted. The first had been regrettable though venial; and the second, if well meant, had been fatal in its consequences. But if I should not have done it now, in my middle sixties, it was because I had long ceased to have the wish to meddle, for good or ill, in other people’s business. “Once a go-between, never a go-between” had become my maxim.
As to the spell, I shook my head; I could not take it seriously. It did not fit into the world of facts. The search for facts, which meant the search for truth, had such a tranquillizing and reconciling effect on me that by the end the episode at Brandham Hall, that Bluebeard’s chamber in my mind, had lost its terrors. It was no more horrific than a long and intricate bibliographical quest. It might have been something that had happened to another person. With the opening of the door, and the installation of electric light into the cupboard, the skeletons had crumbled into dust.
The facts that I had brought to lig
ht had been sufficient for my purpose. They were incomplete, of course. If I wanted to know more precisely how I stood vis-à-vis life—success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, integration and disintegration, and so on—I should have to examine other facts, facts beyond the reach of memory and gleaned from outside, from living sources. I should have to know what happened to the other persons in the story, and how the experience had affected them. The others! I did not take kindly to the fact of others. I did not mind their names in print, providing evidence, but I did not want them in the flesh: that way they were most troublesome.
As to these “others” of Brandham Hall, somehow I could not think of them as going on after I had stopped. They were like figures in a picture, the frame enclosed them, the two-fold frame of time and place, and they could not step outside it, they were imprisoned in Brandham Hall and the summer of 1900. There let them stay, fixed in their two dimensions: I did not want to free them.
So with a quiet mind I was able to approach the last piece of evidence, the unopened letter.
Darling, [it read—only one “darling” this time],
Our trusty messenger must have made a bloomer. You can’t have said six o’clock. Why, you’ll be all covered with hay-seed, you’ll have straw in your hair, you won’t be fit to be seen! So I’m writing to say, Come at six thirty if you can, because it’s our dear postman’s birthday and I have to be there to give him a little present, just the thing for a postman—he won’t have to walk any more, poor pet, when he takes our messages! I’m giving him this. Mama is making other plans for him and he may not be able to outwit her, cunning as he is, and if he doesn’t get through with it I shall be there at six, and wait till seven or eight or nine or Doomsday—darling, darling.
The tears came into my eyes—tears, which I had never shed, I think, since I left Brandham Hall. So that was why she had given me the green bicycle—to facilitate my journeys between the Hall and the farm. Eh bien je jamais! She was a cool one. I didn’t mind; my only wish was that I had kept it, instead of letting Mother give it away because I wouldn’t use it.
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