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

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.
     
     
     
     
      1
     
     
      THE 8TH of July was a Sunday, and on the following
Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near
Salisbury, for Brandham Hall. My mother arranged that my Aunt
Charlotte, a Londoner, should take me across London. Between bouts
of stomach-turning trepidation I looked forward wildly to the
visit.
      The invitation came about in this way. Maudsley had
never been a special friend of mine, as witness the fact that I
have forgotten his Christian name. Perhaps it will come to me
later; it may be one of the things that my memory fights shy of.
But in those days schoolboys seldom called one another by their
first names. These were regarded simply as a liability, though not
such a heavy liability as one’s middle name, which it was just
foolhardy to reveal. Maudsley was a dark-haired, sallow,
round-faced boy, with a protruding upper lip that showed his teeth;
he was a year younger than I was, and distinguished neither in work
nor in games, but he managed to get by, as we should say. I knew
him pretty well because he was a member of my dormitory, and just
before the affair of the diary we discovered a mild liking for each
other, chose each other as companions for walks (we walked out in a
crocodile), compared some of our personal treasures, and imparted
to each other scraps of information more intimate, and therefore
more fraught with peril, than schoolboys