“Have you heard the news?”
“What news?” I had hardly spoken to anybody.
“About Jenkins and Strode.” He looked at me narrowly.
“What is it?”
“They were out on the roofs last night and Jenkins slipped and Strode tried to hold him but he couldn’t and was pulled off too. They’re both in the San with concussion of the brain and their people have been sent for. Jenkins’s mater and pater have just arrived. They came in a cab with the blinds drawn down and Jenkins’s mater is in black already. I thought you might be interested.”
I said nothing and the boy, with a backward glance at me, went off whistling. I felt faint and didn’t recognize myself: it was so extraordinary not to be afraid of the gang any more. But I was afraid—afraid of what they might do to me in case I was a murderer. The bell went and I began to walk towards the door in the corner, and two of the boys in my dorm came up and shook hands with me and said “Congrats” with respect in their faces. So then I knew it was all right.
Afterwards I was quite a hero, for nobody, it turned out, had much liking for Jenkins and Strode, though nobody had raised a finger to stop them ragging me. Even their four chums who used to help them to knock me about said they only did it because Jenkins and Strode made them. Jenkins and Strode had told everyone about the curses, meaning to make a fool of me, and what the whole school wanted to know was: did I mean to use the third curse? Even the boys in the top classroom spoke to me about this. It was generally agreed that it would be more sporting not to, but that I should be quite within my rights if I did: “Those chaps want a lesson,” the head of the school told me. However, I didn’t use it. I was secretly terrified at what I had done, and if it hadn’t been for the current of public opinion running my way I might easily have got into a morbid state about it. As it was, I devised a number of spells intended to make the victims recover, but these I did not enter in my diary, partly because they would have detracted from the sense of utter triumph I was being encouraged to feel, and partly because if they failed, my public reputation as a magician would have suffered. Nor would it have been a popular move; for during the few days that the boys’ lives hung in the balance, we all went about in a subdued manner with long faces, but secretly hoping for the worst. Ghoulish reports—faces under sheets, parents in tears—were circulated, and the mood of tension and crisis demanded an outlet in catastrophe. Of this it was cheated, but very gradually; and during the drawn-out anticlimax I received many rather rueful congratulations on my forbearance in not having launched the third curse, which most of the boys, including in certain moods myself, believed would have been fatal.
“Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?” No, I was not; I had come through with flying colours. I was the hero of the hour, and though my vogue did not last long at that high level, I never quite lost it. I became a recognized authority on two subjects dear to the hearts of most boys at that time: black magic and code-making, and I was frequently consulted on both these subjects. I even made a little out of it, charging threepence a time for my advice, which I gave only after certain necromantic formalities had been gone through, passwords exchanged, and so on. I also invented a language and had the delirious pleasure, for a few days, of hearing it used round me. It consisted, if I remember, in making the syllable “ski” alternately the prefix and suffix of each word in a sentence, thus: “Skihave youski skidone yourski skiprep?” It was considered very funny, so I got a reputation as a wag as well. And also as a master of language. I was no longer made fun of if I used long words; on the contrary they were expected of me; the diary became a quarry for synonyms of the most ambitious kind. It was then that I began to cherish a dream of becoming a writer—perhaps the greatest writer of the greatest century, the twentieth. I had no idea what I wanted to write about, but I composed sentences that I thought would look well and sound well in print; that my writing should achieve the status of print was my ambition, and I thought of a writer as someone whose work fulfilled print’s requirements.
One question was often put to me, but I never answered it: what exactly was the meaning of the curses that had literally brought about the downfall of Jenkins and Strode? How did I translate them? I didn’t, of course, myself know what they meant. I could easily have produced a translation, but I felt for several reasons it would be wiser not to. Kept secret, they would still minister to my prestige; revealed, and used by irresponsible people, who knew what harm they might do? They might even be turned against me. Meanwhile a good deal of private curse-making went on: strips of paper covered with cabalistic signs were passed from hand to hand. But though their authors sometimes claimed to have obtained results, nothing happened to challenge the supremacy of mine.
“Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?” No, I was not; I had won, and my victory, though its methods were unorthodox, had fulfilled the chief requirement of our code: I had won it by myself, or at any rate without calling in the help of any human agency. There had been no sneaking. Also, I had kept within the traditional terms of schoolboy experience—so fantastic in some ways, so matter-of-fact in others. The curses were not really a shot in the dark, though their outcome had been so sensational. They were aimed at the superstitiousness that I instinctively knew my schoolfellows possessed. I had been a realist, I had somehow sized up the situation and solved it with the means at my command, and I enjoyed a realist’s reward. If I had looked on Southdown Hill School as being in some way an adjunct of the twentieth century, or as being intimately related to the zodiac—a hierarchy of glorious, perfected beings slowly ascending into the ether—what a cropper I should have come.
With an effort I took up the diary again and turned the closely written pages, so buoyant with success. February, March, April—with April the entries fell off, for it was the holidays—May full up again and the first half of June. Again the dearth of entries and I was in July. Under Monday 9th I had written “Brandham Hall.” A list of names followed, the names of my fellow guests, and then: “Tuesday 10th. 84.7 degrees.” Each day after that I had recorded the maximum temperature and much else, 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 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 usually exchange. One of these confidences was our respective addresses; he told me his home was called Brandham Hall and I told him mine was called Court Place, and of the two he was the more impressed, for he was, as I afterwards discovered, a snob, which I had not begun to be, except in the world of the heavenly bodies—there, I was a super-snob.
The name Court Place predisposed him in my favour, as I suspect it also did his mother. But they were mistaken, for Court Place was quite an ordinary house, set a little back in the village street, behind looped chains, of which I was rather proud. Well, not quite ordinary, for part of the house was reputed to be very old; the bishops of Salisbury, it was said, once held their court there; hence the name. Behind the house we had an acre of garden, intersected by a stream, which a jobbing gardener attended to three days a week. It was not a court in the grandiloquent sense of the word, such as Maudsley, I fancy, believed it to be.
All the same, my mother did not find it easy to keep up. My father was, I suppose, a crank. He had a fine, precise mind, which ignored what it was not interested in. Without being a misanthrope he was unsociable and nonconforming. He had his own unorthodox theories of education, one of which was that I should not be sent to school. As far as he could he educated me himself with the help of a tutor who came out from Salisbury. I should never have gone to school if he had had his way, but my mother always wanted me to and so did I, and as soon as was possible after his death I went. I admired him and revered his opinions, but my temperament had more in common with my mother’s.
His talents went into his hobbies, which were book-collecting and gardening; for his career he had accepted a routine occupation and was quite content to be a bank manager in Salisbury. My mother fretted at his lack of enterprise and was a little jealous and impatient of his hobbies, which enclosed him in himself, as hobbies do, and, so she thought, got him nowhere. In this she turned out to be wrong, for he was a collector of taste and foresight, and his books made a sum that astonished us when they were sold; indeed, I owe to them my immunity from the more pressing cares of life. But this was long after; at the time, my mother fortunately never thought of selling his books: she cherished the things he had been fond of, partly from a feeling that she had been unfair to him; and we lived on her money, and the pension from the bank, and the little he had been able to put by.
My mother, though unworldly, was always attracted by the things of the world; she felt that if circumstances had been different, she could have taken her place in it; but thanks to my father’s preferring objects to people, she had very little chance.
She liked gossip, she liked social occasions and to be dressed right for them; she was sensitive to public opinion in the village, and an invitation to some function in Salisbury would always set her aflutter. To mix with well-dressed people on some smooth lawn, with the spire of the Cathedral soaring above, to greet and be greeted by them, to exchange items of family news and make timid contributions to political discussions—all this gave her a tremulous pleasure; she felt supported by the presence of acquaintances, she needed a social frame. When the landau arrived (there was a livery stable in the village) she stepped into it with a little air of pride and self-fulfilment very different from her usual diffident and anxious manner. And if she had persuaded my father to go with her, she looked almost triumphant.
After he died, what little social consequence we had diminished; but at no time was it such as anyone with a delicate sense of social nuances would have associated with the name Court Place.
I did not tell Maudsley this, of course—not from any wish for concealment, but because our code discouraged personal disclosures. Bragging about the wealth and grandeur of one’s parents was not unknown, but Maudsley was not one of those who did it. In some ways he was precociously sophisticated; his corners must have been rubbed off before he came to school. I never understood him very deeply; perhaps there was little to understand, except an instinctive responsiveness to public opinion, a savoir-faire that enabled him to be, without appearing to seek it, on the winning side.
During the diary episode he had remained neutral, which was all that one could hope for from one’s friends. (This is not cynicism; belonging to a lower age group, they could have done nothing for me effectively.) But when I was the winning side he made no secret of his pleasure at my success and, I afterwards learned, he told his family about it. He took lessons from me in magic and I remember drawing up for him, free, certain curses that he could use if he was in a tight place—though I never thought he would be in one. He looked up to me and I felt that his esteem was decidedly worth having. Once in an expansive moment he confided to me that he was going to Eton, and he was like a premature Etonian, easy, well-mannered, sure of himself.