PROLOGUE
THE PAST is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownership—feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.
It was a roll-call in reverse; the children of the past announced their names, and I said “Here.” Only the diary refused to disclose its identity.
My first impression was that it was a present someone had brought me from abroad. The shape, the lettering, the purple limp leather curling upwards at the corners, gave it a foreign look; and it had, I could see, gold edges. Of all the exhibits it was the only one that might have been expensive. I must have treasured it; why, then, could I not give it a context?
I did not want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect, however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the secret of the diary flashed upon me.
Yet even then I did not want to touch it; indeed my unwillingness increased, for now I knew why I distrusted it. I looked away and it seemed to me that every object in the room exhaled the diary’s enervating power and spoke its message of disappointment and defeat. And as if that was not enough, the voices reproached me with not having had the grit to overcome them. Under this twofold assault I sat staring at the bulging envelopes around me, the stacks of papers tied up with red tape—the task of sorting which I had set myself for winter evenings, and of which the red collar-box had been almost the first item; and I felt, with a bitter blend of self-pity and self-reproach, that had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different. I should not be sitting in this drab, flowerless room, where the curtains were not even drawn to hide the cold rain beating on the windows, or contemplating the accumulation of the past and the duty it imposed on me to sort it out. I should be sitting in another room, rainbow-hued, looking not into the past but into the future; and I should not be sitting alone.
So I told myself, and with a gesture born of will, as most of my acts were, not inclination, I took the diary out of the box and opened it.
DIARY
FOR THE YEAR
1900
it said in a copperplate script unlike the lettering of today; and round the year thus confidently heralded, the first year of the century, winged with hope, clustered the signs of the zodiac, each somehow contriving to suggest a plenitude of life and power, each glorious, though differing from the others in glory. How well I remembered them, their shapes and attitudes! And I remembered too, though it was no longer potent for me, the magic with which they were then invested, and the tingling sense of coming fruition they conveyed—the lowly creatures no less than the exalted ones.
The Fishes sported deliciously, as though there were no such things as nets and hooks; the Crab had a twinkle in its eye, as though it was well aware of its odd appearance and thoroughly enjoyed the joke; and even the Scorpion carried its terrible pincers with a gay, heraldic air, as though its deadly intentions existed only in legend. The Ram, the Bull, and the Lion epitomized imperious manhood; they were what we all thought we had it in us to be; careless, noble, self-sufficient, they ruled their months with sovereign sway. As for the Virgin, the one distinctively female figure in the galaxy, I can scarcely say what she meant to me. She was dressed adequately, but only in the coils and sweeps of her long hair; and I doubt whether the school authorities, had they known about her, would have approved the hours of dalliance my thoughts spent with her, though these, I think, were innocent enough. She was, to me, the key to the whole pattern, the climax, the coping-stone, the goddess—for my imagination was then, though it is no longer, passionately hierarchical; it envisaged things in an ascending scale, circle on circle, tier on tier, and the annual, mechanical revolution of the months did not disturb this notion. I knew that the year must return to winter and begin again; but to my apprehensions the zodiacal company were subject to no such limitations: they soared in an ascending spiral towards infinity.
And the expansion and ascension, as of some divine gas, which I believed to be the ruling principle of my own life, I attributed to the coming century. The year 1900 had an almost mystical appeal for me; I could hardly wait for it: “Nineteen hundred, nineteen hundred,” I would chant to myself in rapture; and as the old century drew to its close, I began to wonder whether I should live to see its successor. I had an excuse for this: I had been ill and was acquainted with the idea of death; but much more it was the fear of missing something infinitely precious—the dawn of a Golden Age. For that was what I believed the coming century would be: a realization, on the part of the whole world, of the hopes that I was entertaining for myself.
The diary was a Christmas present from my mother, to whom I had confided some, though by no means all, of my aspirations for the future, and she wanted its dates to be worthily enshrined.
In my zodiacal fantasies there was one jarring note, to which, when I indulged them, I tried not to listen, for it flawed the experience. This was my own role in it.
My birthday fell in late July and I had an additional reason, an excellent one, though I should have been loath to mention it at school, for claiming the Lion as my symbol. But much as I admired him and what he stood for, I could not identify myself with him, because of late I had lost the faculty, which, like other children, I had once revelled in, of pretending that I was an animal. A term and a half at school had helped to bring about this disability in my imagination; but it was also a natural change. I was between twelve and thirteen, and I wanted to think of myself as a man.
There were only two candidates, the Archer and the Water-carrier, and, to make the choice more difficult, the artist, who probably had few facial types at his command, had drawn them very much alike. They were, in fact, the same man following different callings. He was strong and sturdy, and this appealed to me, for one of my ambitions was to become a kind of Hercules. I leaned to the Archer as the more romantic, and because the idea of shooting appealed to me. But my father had been against war, which I supposed was the Archer’s profession; and as to the Water-carrier, though I knew him to be a useful member of society I could not help conceiving of him as a farm labourer or at best a gardener, neither of which I wanted to be. The two men attracted and repelled me at the same time; perhaps I was jealous of the
m. When I studied the title-page of the diary, I tried not to look at the Sagittarius-Aquarius combination, and when the whole conception took wing and mounted to the zenith, drawing the twentieth century with it for a final heavenly romp, I sometimes contrived to leave it behind. A zodiacal sign without portfolio, I then had the Virgin to myself.
One result of the diary was that I went to the top of the class for knowing the signs of the zodiac. In another way its influence was less fortunate. I wanted to be worthy of the diary, of its purple leather, its gold edges, its general sumptuousness; and I felt that my entries must live up to all these. They must record something worth while, and they must reach a high standard of literary attainment. My ideas of what was worth while were already rather advanced, and it seemed to me that my school life did not provide events fit for such a magnificent setting as my diary was, or for the year 1900.
What had I written? I remembered the catastrophe well enough, but not the stages that led up to it. I turned the pages. The entries were few. “Tea with C.’s pater and mater—very jolly.” Then, more sophisticated: “Jolly decent tea with L.’s people. Muffins, scones, cakes, and strawberry jam.” “Drove to Canterbury in 3 breaks. Visited Cathedral, very interresting. Thomas A’Becket’s blood. Très riping.” “Walk to Kingsgate Castle. M. showed me his new knife.” This was the first reference to Maudsley; I turned the pages more quickly. Ah, here it was—the Lambton House saga. Lambton House was a near-by preparatory school with which we felt ourselves on terms of special rivalry; it was to us what Eton is to Harrow. “Played Lambton House At Home. Match drawn 1–1.” “Played Lambton House Away. Match drawn 3–3.” Then: “Last and Ultimate and Final Replay. Lambton House VANQUISHED 2–1!!!! McClintock scored both goals!!!!”
After that no more entries for a time. Vanquished! That was the word for which I was made to suffer. My attitude to the diary was twofold and contradictory: I was intensely proud of it and wanted everybody to see it and what I had written in it, and at the same time I had an instinct for secrecy and wanted nobody to see it. I spent hours balancing the pros and cons of either course. I thought of the applause that would greet the diary as it was wonderingly passed from hand to hand. I thought of the enhancement to my prestige, the opportunities to swank of which I should avail myself discreetly but effectively. And on the other hand there was the intimate pleasure of brooding over the diary in secret, like a bird sitting on its eggs, hatching, creating; losing myself in zodiacal reveries, speculating upon the glorious destiny of the twentieth century, intoxicated by my almost sensuous premonitions of what was coming to me. These were joys that depended upon secrecy; they would vanish if I told them or even betrayed their source.
So I tried to get the best of both worlds: I hinted at the possession of hidden treasure, but I did not say what it was. And for a time this policy was successful; curiosity was aroused, questions were asked: “Well, what is it? Tell us.” I enjoyed parrying these: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I enjoyed going about with an “I could if I would” air and a secret smile. I even encouraged questionnaires of the “animal, vegetable, or mineral” type, breaking them off when the scent became too hot.
Perhaps I gave too much away; at any rate, the one thing I hadn’t guarded against happened. I had no warning of it, none: it happened at break, in the middle of the morning, and I suppose I hadn’t looked in my desk that day. Suddenly I was surrounded by a mob of grinning urchins chanting: “Who said ‘vanquished’? Who said ‘vanquished’?” And in a moment they were all upon me; I was borne to the ground; various forms of physical torture were applied, and my nearest tormentor—he was almost as breathless as I, so many were pressing on him, cried: “Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?”
For the moment I certainly was, and for the whole of the next week, which seemed an eternity, I was subjected to the same treatment at least once a day—not always at the same hour, for the ringleaders chose their opportunity with care. Sometimes, as the day wore on, I thought I had escaped; then I would see the nefarious band in conclave; cries of “vanquished” would break out and the pack would be upon me. As quickly as I could I admitted myself vanquished, but I was usually sore all over before quarter was given.
Strangely enough, though so idealistic about the future, I was quite realistic about the present: it never occurred to me to connect my school life with the Golden Age or think that the twentieth century was letting me down. Nor did I have to restrain an impulse to write home or sneak to one of the masters. I had brought it on myself, I knew, by using that pretentious word, and did not dispute the right of public opinion to punish me. But I was desperately anxious to prove I was not vanquished; and as I clearly could not do that by physical force, I must resort to guile. Rather to my surprise, the diary had been returned to me. Apart from having the word “vanquished” scrawled all over it, it was uninjured. I attributed its restitution to magnanimity; I think now that it was probably due to prudential considerations, to a fear that I should report its disappearance as a theft. To report a theft was not against our code, it was not sneaking, as telling about my physical sufferings would have been. I gave them credit for this, but I was most anxious to put an end to the persecution and also to get even with them. Even, but no more: I was not vindictive. Luckily the jeering words were written in pencil. Retiring with the defaced diary to the lavatory, I set about erasing them, and it was there, in the relaxed state of mind that mechanical rubbing induces, that I had my idea.
They would believe, so I reasoned, that the diary had been discredited forever as a talisman for self-esteem—and, indeed, they were nearly right, for at first I felt that it had lost its magic by being violated; I could hardly bear to look at it. But as little by little the taunting word “vanquished” disappeared, the diary began to recover its value for me, I felt its power returning. How wonderful if I could make it the instrument of my vengeance! There would be poetic justice in that. More-over, my enemies would be off their guard, they would never suspect danger from a gun they had so thoroughly spiked. And at the same time their consciences would not be quite easy about it, it would be a symbol of the injury they had done me, and they would be all the more sensitive to an attack from it.
In the privacy of my retreat I practised assiduously; and then I cut my finger, dipped my pen in blood, and transcribed the two curses into the diary.
I looked at them now, brown and faded, but still legible though not comprehensible, except for the two names printed in block letters, JENKINS AND STRODE, which stood out in sinister intelligibility. Comprehensible they never were, for they made no sense: I concocted them out of figures and algebraical symbols and what I remembered of some Sanskrit characters I had seen and pored over in a translation of the Peau de chagrin at home. CURSE ONE was followed by CURSE TWO. Each took a page of the diary. On the next page, which was otherwise blank, I had written:
CURSE THREE
AFTER CURSE THREE THE VICTIM DIES
Given under my hand and written in my BLOOD
BY ORDER
THE AVENGER.
Faded though the characters were, they still breathed malevolence, they could still pluck a superstitious nerve, and I ought to have been ashamed of them. But I was not. On the contrary I felt a certain envy of the self of those days, who would not take things lying down, who had no notion of appeasement, and who was prepared to put all he had into making himself respected in society.
What I expected to be the outcome of my plan I hardly knew, but I put the diary in my locker, which I purposely left unlocked, even ajar, with the cover of the diary showing, and awaited results.
I did not have long to wait—the results came very soon and were very disagreeable. Within a few hours I was set upon, and the drubbing I got then was the worst of the whole series. “Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?” cried Strode, bestriding me in the mêlée. “Who’s the avenger now?” And he pressed his fingers under my eyes, a trick that, it was commonly believed, would cause the
m to pop out.
That night, in bed, my smarting eyes shed tears for the first time. It was my second term at school; I had never been unpopular before, still less had I been systematically bullied, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I felt I had shot my bolt. All my persecutors were older than I was, and I couldn’t possibly gather together a gang to fight them. And failing that, I couldn’t ask for sympathy. It was perfectly correct to enlist supporters if action was to be the outcome; but to confide in someone for the sake of confiding, that simply was not done. All the other four boys in my dormitory (Maudsley was one) knew of my trouble, of course; but not one would have dreamed of mentioning it, even when they saw my scars and bruises—perhaps least of all then. Even to say “Bad luck” would have been in bad taste, as suggesting that I was not able to look after myself. It would have been like pointing out some physical defect. The law that one must consume one’s own smoke was absolute, and no one subscribed to it more whole-heartedly than I. A late-comer to school, I had uncritically accepted all its standards. I was a conformist: it never occurred to me that because I suffered, there was something wrong with the system, or with the human heart.
One act of consideration, however, my room-mates showed me and I still remember it with gratitude. It was our custom to talk for some few minutes after lights out, simply because to do so was against the rules; and if any of the five failed to join in he was pointedly reminded of it and told he was a funk, and letting down the good name of the dorm. Whether my sobs were audible I don’t know, but I dared not trust my voice to speak, and nobody censured my silence.
The next day at break I wandered about by myself, keeping close to the wall, for there, at any rate, I could not be surrounded. I was keeping a weather eye open for the gang (where there had been nobody, suddenly there were six) when a boy I hardly knew came up with an odd look on his face and said: