Afterwards on no account to touch the liquid with the lips, but pour it down the W.C., leaving all utensils clean and workmanlike, remembering that others have to use them after you.
How much of these instructions I was able to repeat I cannot tell; I had written them down on a blank page of my diary, which I meant to tear out, for safety’s sake, as soon as I had ceased to be proud of them. But I forgot to do that, as I forgot many other things, the following day.
Although my eyes got gradually accustomed to the darkness, I was almost on top of the outhouses before I saw the thick blur of the deadly nightshade. It was like a lady standing in her doorway looking out for someone. I was prepared to dread it, but not prepared for the tumult of emotions it aroused in me. In some way it wanted me, I felt, just as I wanted it; and the fancy took me that it wanted me as an ingredient, and would have me. The spell was not waiting to be born in my bedroom, as I meant it should be, but here in this roofless shed, and I was not preparing it for the deadly nightshade, but the deadly nightshade was preparing it for me. “Come in,” it seemed to say; and at last after an unfathomable time I stretched my hand out into the thick darkness where it grew and felt the shoots and leaves close softly on it. I withdrew my hand and peered. There was no room for me inside, but if I went inside, into the unhallowed darkness where it lurked, that springing mass of vegetable force, I should learn its secret and it would learn mine. And in I went. It was stifling, yet delicious, the leaves, the shoots, even the twigs, so yielding; and this must be a flower that brushed my eyelids, and this must be a berry that pressed against my lips …
At that I panicked and tried to force my way out, but could not find the way out: there seemed to be a wall on every side, and I barked my knuckles. At first I was afraid of hurting the plant; then in my terror I began to tear at it and heard its branches ripping and crackling. Soon I cleared a space round my head, but that was not enough, it must all be clear. The plant was much less strong than I supposed. I fought with it; I got hold of its main stem and snapped it off. There was a swish; a soft, sighing fall of leaf on leaf; a swirl, a debris of upturned leaves, knee-deep all round me; and standing up among them, the torn stem. I seized it and pulled it with all my might, and as I pulled, the words of the missing spell floated into my mind out of some history lesson—“delenda est belladonna! delenda est belladonna!” I heard the roots creaking and cracking, felt their last strength arrayed against me, the vital principle of the plant defending itself in its death agony. “Delenda est belladonna!” I chanted, not loudly, but loud enough for anyone listening to hear, and braced myself for a last pull. And then it gave, came away in my hands, throwing up with a soft sigh a little shower of earth, which rustled on the leaves like rain; and I was lying on my back in the open, still clutching the stump, staring up at its mop-like coronal of roots, from which grains of earth kept dropping on my face.
22
I SLEPT deeply that night and, for the first time since I came to Brandham Hall, was still asleep when the footman called me. I felt very strange and could not collect myself. The feeling of strangeness did not wear off when he had drawn the curtains. It was something inside me, I knew, but it was also something outside. I just remembered to say: “Good morning, Henry!” Otherwise he would have gone out without speaking: he never spoke to me unless I spoke to him first—and not always then.
“Good morning, Master Leo, many happy returns!”
“Why, it’s my birthday! I had quite forgotten.”
“You may have, Master Leo,” said the footman, “but there’s others haven’t. Time’s running on! You’re thirteen now, you’ll soon be fourteen: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and every year bringing new troubles.”
I didn’t quite like this speech, though I knew it was kindly meant and only reflected the ingrained pessimism of Henry’s outlook. But I still felt strange: what could it be? I looked at the window and one explanation dawned on me.
“Good gracious, it’s raining!”
“It’s not raining yet,” said Henry grudgingly. “But it will before the day’s out, mark my words. Not that we don’t need it. All this hot weather isn’t natural.”
“Oh, but it’s summer!” I exclaimed.
“Summer or not, it isn’t natural,” Henry repeated. “Why, everything’s burnt up and they do say”—here he looked down at me ominously—“that quite a lot of people have gone mad.”
“Oh,” I exclaimed, for mental derangement, like most forms of calamity, had a special interest for me.
“The dog days, you know,” he said confidentially, shaking his head.
Still interested in the effects of the weather, I asked: “Do you know of any dog that’s gone mad—personally, I mean?”
Again he shook his head. “It isn’t only dogs go mad,” he remarked with gloomy relish; “it’s human beings.”
“Oh, not anybody here?” I asked, all ears.
“I’m not saying it is,” said Henry oracularly, “and I’m not saying it isn’t. But what I do say is, A miss is as good as a mile, any day.”
I could make nothing of this, and if his manner had not been so chilling I should have asked him to explain it. He was bending over the washstand, ritually removing the water-jug from the basin and replacing it with a brass hot-water can, over which he draped a face towel.
Suddenly he said accusingly: “There’s a piece of the soap-dish missing.”
“It’s over there,” I answered guiltily, pointing to the writing-table, which, for reasons of space, had been put at the end of the bed. Henry came across and stared at my handiwork.
It looked like a little heathen altar, or a study for Stonehenge. The four books formed the temenos; within stood the four candles, close together; above them, resting on the books, lay the drainer from the soap-dish, and on the drainer, ready to receive the ingredients, my silver cup. The water-bottle, the damp sponge, the four boxes of matches, were set at ritual intervals. Only my watch was absent from the roll-call. Flimsy and childish-looking as the structure was, it did somehow bear witness to occult intention, as if it was ready to do what harm it could, and I felt exceedingly embarrassed at having to confess myself its architect.
Henry shook his head slowly; I knew what he meant: Here is someone else whose brains have been turned by the heat. But all he said was:
“It looks as if you’ve been having a field day.”
This was a compendious comment he often used to indicate Olympian tolerance for actions which, though harmless, were below the comprehension line.
“But,” he added grimly, “it’s not my job to clear them up.”
As soon as Henry had gone I got out of bed and gingerly dismantled my spell mechanism. Once the various objects were separated and back in their proper place, they seemed to lose their collective power for evil. They had only acquired it while I slept, for last night, after my struggle with the deadly nightshade, they had seemed the whitest magic, hardly magic at all. I had been so strung up by the encounter that my journey back, with its prospect of being locked out, had had no terrors for me. I walked in at the open door as if it had been eleven in the morning, not eleven at night.
And now the skies were grey; that was one reason why I felt strange. We had had cloudy days before, but not dull days, threatening rain. I was so used to being greeted by the sun that its absence was as disconcerting as a frown on a face that has always smiled. It told me summer was over and a sterner season lay ahead.
My experience of the night before had somehow prepared me for this. Not in vain had I allied myself with the weather; my summer was ended, too. I had emptied myself out over the deadly nightshade, purged myself of the accretions of fantasy that had been accumulating since I came to Brandham Hall. No one had ever told me to beware of them, but now I told myself. Good-bye to make-believe! I tried, with tolerable success, to think of my struggle in the outhouse as a mere gardening operation, the destruction of a poisonous weed of whose existence I ought long ago to have warned
my hostess.
Now that I was thirteen, I was under an obligation to look reality in the face. At school I should be one of the older boys, to whom the others looked up. When I thought of last night’s performance at the outhouse, of my efforts to impose my puny self upon events, when I thought of my career as a magician, the mumbo-jumbo which I had practised and which I had taught to others, I grew hot. And my letter to my mother—that pitiful petition for recall—how I despised myself for writing it! Looking back on my actions since I came to Brandham, I condemned them all; they seemed the actions of another person.
I condemned them unheard. I did not stop to ask myself how, if they were to do again, I should improve on them. I saw them all as instances of a gross piece of quackery, which had begun the moment I arrived at Brandham—had indeed begun before, when Jenkins and Strode had fallen off the roof. Ever since then I had been playing a part, which seemed to have taken in everybody, and most of all myself. It would not have taken in my old nurse, who had been very quick to spot in me, or any child, a tendency to ape an alien personality. She had no objection to one’s being any kind of animal, or any kind of human being, high or low, young or old, dead or alive, provided it was a pretence, provided you could say who you were, when challenged. But if the assumed personality was a distortion of one’s own ego, the “I” decked out in borrowed plumes meant to impress, somebody one would like to be thought to be, then she was down on one. “Who are you being now?” she would ask me. “Oh, nobody special. Just Leo.” “Well, you’re not my Leo. You’re another little boy and I don’t like him.”
All the time at Brandham I had been another little boy, and the grown-ups had aided and abetted me in this; it was a great deal their fault. They liked to think of a little boy as a little boy, corresponding to their idea of what a little boy should be—as a representative of little boyhood—not a Leo or a Marcus. They even had a special language designed for little boys—at least some of them had, some of the visitors; not the family: the family, and Lord Trimingham too, who was soon to be one of them, respected one’s dignity. But there are other ways, far more seductive to oneself than the title “my little man,” to make one feel unreal. No little boy likes to be called a little man, but any little boy likes to be treated as a little man, and this is what Marian had done for me: at times, and when she had wanted to, she had endowed me with the importance of a grown-up; she had made me feel that she depended on me. She, more than anyone else, had puffed me up.
No doubt, as Henry said, the heat had something to do with it. The heat had knocked out Mrs. Maudsley—the heat and Marian. Perhaps Marian was the heat? It had also knocked out Marcus, and he had taken it more sensibly than anyone else: he had come out in spots and retired to bed. He had no wish to be thought other than he was; he could have told me he had measles, but he didn’t. He was never taken in by himself; even his pretences were not for themselves, but had an ulterior object. Once or twice his French personality had run away with him, but its main object was to score off me. He was interested in what really went on around him, not in what his imagination could make of it. That was why he was fond of gossip: he wanted to know about people, not to imagine about them. It would not have pleased him in the least to imagine himself a romantic outlaw, defending a deadly secret to the death; he would much rather tell the secret and see what happened. I had never admired Marcus so much as I did on the morning of my thirteenth birthday.
This is what I think now, but it is also what I felt then, and my feelings were of a substance thicker than thought and pressed more heavily on my tired, bewildered mind.
In my attack upon the deadly nightshade I had gone a step too far, even for myself. Supposing someone had seen me “savaging it”! Supposing someone—the imaginary listener I had evoked—had heard me chanting “delenda est belladonna” to the night! He might well have thought me mad. It was bad enough to have been seen by myself.
The grey, liquid light that lay like rain-water on roofs and trees flowed softly into my small, tall room. Henry had taken away the Eton suit I wore for dinner (sometimes he took away my braces too, and I had to ring for them), and put out my green suit on the chair, with my underclothes, stockings, and garters neatly piled above. Having by forced marches reached the final stage, I was just about to put the suit on when suddenly I thought I wouldn’t. Not because of its colour or because it reminded me of Marian’s duplicity—no, it was a suit like any other; but it was also my motley, the vesture of my make-believe. I was prepared to be called a green boy, which I was, but I didn’t want to be taken for Robin Hood, which I was not. So I got out my Norfolk suit, which already had the appearance of having been put away for a long time, and the stockings that went with it, and my boots. Very odd I felt when I put them on, with all the pressures coming in new places and very odd I felt when I saw myself in the glass. But at any rate it was myself I saw, not a sea-green, corruptible parody.
During prayers I was anonymous, a worshipper, exempt from mortal notice, but when we rose from our knees I was a birthday boy in a Norfolk jacket; and when I had been congratulated on being the one, the other, my costume, came in for comment: there was a return, a gentle, innocuous echo, of the teasing of earlier days. I wondered why I had ever minded it; but Lord Trimingham, who clearly thought I might mind, said: “But he’s quite right, and he’s the only one of us who is. A Norfolk jacket in Norfolk, and besides; it’s going to rain. We shall all have to change, but he won’t.” Except for me, everyone at the table was dressed for a fine day. “Yes,” said Marian, whose eyes had a mischievous gleam, “but he looks as if he was going away, that’s what I don’t like. That suit is labelled Liverpool Street.”
Beside my plate were two long envelopes, one in my mother’s handwriting, one in my aunt’s. Ordinarily I should have waited until the end of the meal to read them in private, but today this withdrawal had an air of furtiveness; I wanted all my movements to be public; so, making the excuse that grown-ups made, I opened my mother’s missive. At what was wrapped in tissue paper I did not look, but I took out the letter. It was full of loving messages and apologies. “I have been so vexed with myself for not sending the telegram,” she said. “At the time it seemed more sensible not to; but now I wonder if you weren’t quite well, and didn’t like to say so. You would tell me, my darling, wouldn’t you? I didn’t know I should miss you so much, but I do, I miss you dreadfully, and ten days seems such a long time to wait. Still, they will pass. I hope you are quite happy again, I wish I could feel sure you were. If you are still taking the messages, and find it tiring, do take my advice and ask Mrs. Maudsley to let someone else go. I’m sure she gladly would. And I was afraid, my darling, you would think I wasn’t nice about your new suit, because I said it wasn’t the right colour for a boy. But of course it is, why, soldiers wear it now, poor things—khaki’s a sort of green, and so I’m giving you a tie to go with it. I hope it will go with it, greens are a little apt to clash, but you wouldn’t know that.”
Here I peeped into the envelope, not meaning to take the tie out, but when I saw a corner of the stuff, I couldn’t help it: out it came, a long green serpent. “Oh, what a lovely tie!” exclaimed several voices. “And what a lucky little boy you are!” said one of the new visitors, whom I immediately disliked.
“But it won’t go with that Norfolk suit, you know,” said Marian.
Blushing, I dived back into my letter, which was now only a shallow water, gently a-ripple with my mother’s farewell.
The other letter was longer, for my aunt had much to tell about herself, much to surmise about me. She was an imaginative guesser and knew what one was likely to be doing, but did not always get it quite right. “Norfolk is famous for its dumplings,” she said, “I expect you are having plenty of them.” As a matter of fact, I don’t think we ever had one. “I knew some Maudsleys once,” she hazarded, “and they lived close to where you are; at Hanging Brandham or Steeple Brandham, I forget which. I expect you will have met them.” But, alas, I hadn
’t. On another matter she was better informed: “Your mother tells me you have a new suit, a green one, rather an unusual colour for a boy, perhaps, but I think men’s clothes are far too dingy, don’t you? They say a woman can never choose a tie for a man, but I think that’s all rubbish, so here goes!”
Again I had to break off and peep into the envelope, and again a peep was not enough. A glance warned me that whatever shade of green was right for a boy, this shade was not, it was too mustardy. But as against that, it was already made up into a lovely bow, such as no human hand could tie, while a neat loop at the back made it, even for a hasty dresser, almost foolproof.
But this tie did not have the success of the other. Approval tarried, doubt spread through the room. A cloud was gathering on Marcus’s brow, when suddenly Lord Trimingham said, stretching his hand across the table:
“Can I have a look at it?”
I pushed the tie across to him.
“I think it’s charming,” he said, “so gay. Wait a moment and I’ll show you what it looks like on.”
He pulled off his blue and white spotted tie and after a little fumbling (“I can’t quite get the hang of it”) looped mine to his collar-stud. On him it didn’t look the common thing that Marcus’s deepening frown told me it was; it looked outré but elegant; and he sketched a little flourish with his hands and gave a smile meant to suggest some carefree occasion—Goodwood, perhaps? Even to me it was pathetic how little his face would answer to his thoughts; but he seemed unconscious of that. “What do you say?” he appealed to Mr. Maudsley. “What do you say, Marian?”
I kept the tie for years.
“And now,” said Mrs. Maudsley, pushing back her chair, “today”—she paused—“today is Leo’s day.” She smiled at me, and the smile broke against my face like a cool wave. “How would you like to spend it, Leo?”