The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley Read Free Book Online

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