Eighty point nine, said the thermometer. This was an advance of nearly three degrees on yesterday, but I felt that the sun could do still better, give us a greater grilling; and it turned out I was right.
My thoughts swung back. To give Marian social precedence over Lady Gertrude I had cheated: I anticipated her marriage. “Last but not least on a grey palfrey came the Viscountess Trimingham (ninth of her line), and she, too, dismounted at the door of the humble cottage, carrying a bowl of steaming soup”—I was going to say, but just as I was wondering how she could carry it on horseback, for my imaginings, which would swallow a camel, sometimes also strained at a gnat, I heard a voice behind me that made me jump.
“Hullo, Leo! Just the man I was looking for”—and there she was, in every other way so like my vision of her that it almost surprised me she was not carrying something—but she was: I saw it now, a letter.
“Will you do something for me?” she said.
“Oh yes. What shall I do?”
“Just take this letter.”
It shows how little thought I had of Ted in connection with her that I said: “Who to?”
“Who to? Why, to the farm, you silly,” she answered, half laughing, half impatient.
The scaffolding of my life seemed to collapse: I was dumbfounded.
Many thoughts besieged my mind, but only one found lodging, and it was overwhelming: Marian was engaged to Lord Trimingham, but she hadn’t given up her relationship with Ted, she was still being friendly with another man. What that meant I had no idea, but I knew what it might lead to: murder. The dread word shook me to my foundations, I had no defence against it; and almost without thinking I cried out:
“Oh, I can’t.”
“You can’t?” she echoed, mystified. “Why not?”
I have been asked difficult questions in my life, but only one that has given me more trouble to answer. In a flash I saw the betrayals it would involve if I were to give my reasons. The iron curtain of secrecy, which it was my deepest instinct to keep intact, would be riddled with holes. I should not have answered at all, I should have left her without answering, had not a stronger dread—the dread of something terrible happening—forced me to speak.
“It’s because of Hugh.”
“Because of me?” she repeated. A smile softened her lips and she opened her blue eyes very wide.
I remember closing mine, screwing them up. If I had had the quickness of mind to accept her interpretation of the name, this story might have ended differently, but my one concern, the one channel in which my will-power flowed, was to get his name out; and the trivial but maddening circumstance of her misunderstanding it confused me still further.
“No, not you,” I said. “Hugh.” I tried to hoot it, whistle it as she did.
Marian’s brow darkened. “Hugh?” she said. “What has Hugh to do with it?”
I gave her a despairing look; I had a wild notion of running round to the other side of the game larder, putting it between us. But I had to stand my ground: people didn’t literally run away from questions. Remembering a word Lord Trimingham had used, I muttered:
“He might be upset.”
At that her eyes blazed. She came a step forward and stood over me, her nose hawklike, her body curved to pounce.
“What has he got to do with it?” she repeated. “I told you, this is a business matter between me and—and Mr. Burgess. It has nothing to do with anyone else, no one else in the world. Do you understand, or are you too stupid?”
I stared at her in terror.
“You come into this house, our guest,” she stormed, “we take you in, we know nothing about you, we make a great fuss of you—I suppose you wouldn’t deny that?—I know I have—and then I ask you to do a simple thing which a child in the street that I’d never spoken to would do for the asking—and you have the infernal cheek to say you won’t! We’ve spoilt you. I’ll never ask you to do anything for me again, never! I won’t speak to you again!”
I made some gesture with my hands to try to stop her—to push her away from me or to bring her closer—but she almost struck out at me in her fury; I thought—and it was a moment of relief—that she was actually going to hit me.
All at once her manner changed; she seemed to freeze.
“You want paying, that’s what you want,” she said quietly, “I know.” She produced her purse from somewhere and opened it. “How much do you want, you little Shylock?”
But I had had enough: I snatched the letter, which she still held crumpled in her hand, and ran away from her as fast as I could.
For a time no thoughts would come to me, I was so blasted by her anger. Then I began to realize, beyond the immediate ache and smart, how much, in losing Marian’s friendship, I had lost: it seemed to me that I had lost everything that I valued, and this cut even deeper than her cruel words.
I was not a hypersensitive child. I was used to people being angry with me and made it a point of honour not to mind. I had been called far worse names than Marian had called me, and by people who, I believed, liked me, without turning a hair. I was myself no mean master of invective. Of all the insults she had heaped on me, the one that hurt me most was “Shylock,” because I didn’t know what it meant and therefore couldn’t deny it. I didn’t know if it was personal, like the smell that schoolboys are, or were, so apt to attribute to one another, or moral. The suspicion that everybody was going about saying I was a Shylock and disliked and despised me for it added to my wretchedness.
But if in the realm of experience I was fairly tough, in the realm of the imagination I was not. Marian inhabited that realm, she was indeed its chiefest ornament, the Virgin of the Zodiac; she was as real to my contemplation as she was to my experience—more real. Until I came to Brandham Hall the world of my imagination had been peopled by fictitious beings who behaved as I wanted them to behave; at Brandham Hall it was inhabited by real people who had the freedom of both worlds; in the flesh they could give my imagination what it needed, and in my solitary musings I endowed them with certain magical qualities but did not otherwise idealize them. I did not need to. Marian was many things to me besides Maid Marian of the greenwood. She was a fairy princess who had taken a fancy to a little boy, clothed him, petted him, turned him from a laughing-stock into an accepted member of her society, from an ugly duckling into a swan. With one wave of her wand she had transformed him, at the cricket concert, from the youngest and most insignificant person present to a spellbinder who had held them all in thrall. The transfigured Leo of the last twenty-four hours was her creation; and she had created him, I felt, because she loved him.
And now, again like an enchantress, she had taken it all away and I was back where I had started from—no, much lower. She had taken it away, not so much by her anger and harsh words—those, on the plane of experience, I knew how to make allowances for—as by the complete withdrawal of her favour. As the distance increased between us, my alarm diminished but my heart grew heavier.
For I saw—it was relentlessly borne in upon me—that everything she had done for me had been done with an ulterior motive. She hadn’t been fond of me at all. She had pretended to be fond of me so that she could inveigle me into taking messages between her and Ted Burgess. It was all a put-up job.
As this realization sank into me I stopped running and began to cry. I had not been so long at school that I had lost the power of crying; I cried a good deal and felt calmer for it. A sense of my whereabouts returned to me: I noticed for the first time where I was—on the causeway leading to the sluice.
On the platform of the sluice I paused, out of habit. No one was at work; I had forgotten it was Sunday. I should have to go on to the farm. At once I was seized with an almost invincible reluctance. “I’ll go no further,” I thought, “I’ll creep back to the house and lock myself in my bedroom and perhaps they will leave some food outside the door and I shan’t have to see anyone.” I looked down at the water. It had sunk much lower. The surface of the pool was st
ill blue, but many more boulders than before showed ghostly, corpse-like, at the bottom. And on the other side, the shallow side, the change was greater. Before, it had been untidy; now it was a scene of mad disorder: a tangled mass of water-weeds, all high and dry, and sticking out from them, mounds of yellow gravel, like bald patches on a head. The clusters of round, thin, grey-green rushes, whose tufted tops had made me think of an army of spearmen with pennons, were now much taller than a man; and for a yard or more above the water-line they were coated with a grey deposit—mud. But many had fallen over, let down by their native element, back-broken under their own weight; they lay pointing this way and that, all discipline gone. The army of spearmen had been routed. Their companions in arms, the grass-green reeds that tapered to a point like swords, had escaped the blight and kept their colour; but they too were bent and broken.
As I stood watching, trying to remember what the river looked like before this happened to it, and in my agitation lifting first one foot and then the other, like a restive horse, I heard the letter crackle and knew I must go on.
All the way across the fields instances of Marian’s duplicity kept pricking me, each with its separate sting. In my black mood I persuaded myself that every kindness she had done me, including the present of the green suit, had had the same end in view. She had got me out of going on the family’s afternoon expeditions on the pretext that they bored me, whereas she really wanted to have me free for the message business; she had invited me to stay an extra week for the same reason and not because she wanted me or thought that Marcus did; for the same reason, this very afternoon, she had got rid of Marcus: it was not to do his old nurse a kindness. Everything, it seemed, fell into place. I even believed that but for Ted she would not have played my accompaniments at the concert, or taken my hand or curtsied to me.
My tears flowed afresh and yet I could not bring myself to hate her or even to think badly of her, for that would have increased my wretchedness. “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault,” Lord Trimingham had said, and to this comforting maxim I clung. But it must be somebody’s fault: it must be Ted’s.
The burden of my mission grew heavier, but when I reached the cart track that climbed the hillside to the farm, I accidentally found a way to lighten it. My foot struck a stone; the stone rolled; and I began to kick it, running to and fro across the rutted surface. It became a kind of game, to kick the stone before it stopped or fell into a rut, and to find it when it got lost in the grass verges—no easy task, for they were as brown as it was. Doing this I got very hot, the stone hurt my toes and took the polish off my treasured shoes; but this was a relief to me, and I half hoped I should injure myself too much to go on. And I had a curious experience, almost an illusion, as though a part of me was stationed far away, behind me, perhaps in the belt of trees beyond the river; and from there I could see myself, a bent figure, no bigger than a beetle, weaving to and fro across the ribbon of road. Perhaps it was the part of me that would not take the letter. This dual vision remained with me, dividing me from myself, until I reached the farmyard gate.
I had let myself go on crying because it didn’t matter when nobody could see me, and I thought I could stop whenever I liked. But I found that though I could check the tears, I couldn’t control the sobbing; also I was out of breath from running, which made it worse. So I hung about by the gate, thinking that Ted might come out and see me. Then I would hand him the letter and run off without speaking to him.
But he didn’t come, and I must try to find him. It didn’t occur to me that I should go back without delivering the letter; my state of mind didn’t affect that obligation. So I crossed the stackyard and knocked at the kitchen door. There was no answer and I went in.
He was sitting on a chair behind the table with a gun between his knees, so absorbed that he didn’t hear me. The muzzle was just below his mouth, the barrel was pressed against his naked chest, and he was peering down it. He heard me and jumped up.
“Why,” he said, “it’s the postman!”
He stood the gun against the table and came across to me, with a swish of the brown corduroy trousers, which he wore in the hottest weather. Seeing the hesitations and reservations in my face, he said: “I oughtn’t to be like this when callers come, but I was that hot. Do you mind? Shall I put a shirt on? There are no ladies present.”
One of the ways he had of winning me was by deferring to me.
“N-no,” I began to say, but a hiccup interrupted the word.
He looked at me closely, much as he had looked down the barrel of his gun.
“Why, you’ve been crying!” he said. “You oughtn’t to be crying at your age.” I couldn’t tell if he meant I was too old or too young to cry. “Now what’s the matter? Somebody’s been upsetting you—a woman, I shouldn’t wonder.”
At that I began to cry again, whereupon he whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket and before I could protest began to wipe my eyes. Oddly enough, I didn’t mind his doing this; I had an instinct that, unlike the people of my own class, he wouldn’t think the worse of me for crying.
My tears had ceased to flow and I felt calmer. “Now what can we do to cheer you up?” he said. “Would you like to see Smiler and her foal?”
“N-no, thank you.”
“Would you like to slide down the stack? I’ve put some more straw under the drop.”
“No, thank you.”
He looked round the room, evidently trying to think of something else that might distract me. “Would you like to take my gun outside and let it off?” he asked persuasively. “I was just going to clean it, but I can do that afterwards.”
I shook my head. I wouldn’t fall in with anything he proposed.
“Why not?” he said. “You’ve got to start some time. It kicks, but it wouldn’t hurt you half as much as that catch you held. Ah, that was a beauty, that was. I haven’t forgiven you yet.”
At the reference to my catch something gave in me and I felt more myself.
“Well, would you like to come out and see me shoot something?” he suggested, as if my salvation lay in shooting. “There’s some old rooks round here that could do with a peppering.”
I couldn’t go on saying no, and followed him out into the stackyard. For some reason I imagined that shooting was a long business, a matter of patient waiting for some psychological moment, but no sooner were we outside the door than the gun went to his shoulder.
The bang took me completely by surprise. It frightened me out of my wits, which was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. Half dazed, I watched the bird twirl slowly down to earth a few yards from us. “Well, that’s the end of him,” said Ted, and taking it by the claws, he so alive, the bird so dead, he threw it into a bed of nettles. Overhead sounded a flurried, indignant outcry. I looked up: the rooks were wheeling about the sky, growing more distant every moment. “They won’t come back in a hurry,” Ted remarked. “They’re artful, they are. I was lucky to get that one.”
“Do you ever miss?” I asked.
“Good Lord, yes, but I’m a pretty good shot, though I say it. Now, would you like to see me clean the gun?”
No one is quite the same after a loud bang as before it: I went back into the kitchen a different person. My grief had changed to sulkiness and self-pity, a sure sign of recovery. The deed of blood had somehow sealed a covenant between us, drawn us together by some ancient, sacrificial rite.
“Now you take this cleaning-rod,” he said, “and this bit of four-by-two”—picking up a piece of frayed, white, oily rag—“and you thread it through the eye of this cleaning-rod, same as you would a needle.” Screwing his eyes up, for the kitchen was not well lighted, he suited the action to the word. The slightest movement brought into play the muscles of his forearms; they moved in ridges and hollows from a knot above his elbow, like pistons working from a cylinder. “And then you press it down the breech, like this, and you’ll be surprised how dirty it comes out.” He pushed the wire rod up and down several times
. “There, didn’t I say it would be dirty?” he exclaimed, triumphantly showing me the rag, which was filthy enough to satisfy one’s extremest expectations. “But the barrel’ll be quite clean now, you look—and then look through the other, which I haven’t cleaned. That’ll show you.” He spoke as if I had denied there would be a difference. Taking the gun to the window, he made me look through it. He held it level with one hand; I could hardly hold it with two, resting the other under the barrel. But I got a strange thrill from the contact, from feeling the butt press against my shoulder and the steel cold against my palm.
“Put your head lower if you can,” he said, “and get the sight between the barrels; then you can think you’re taking a real shot.”
I did so, and the sense of power was intensified. I devoted to destruction several objects that I could see through the kitchen window, then slowly swung the muzzle round, picking out things I might blow to pieces in the room itself, until at last it pointed straight at Ted.
“Hi, you mustn’t do that,” he said, “that’s against the rules. Never point a gun at anybody, even when it isn’t loaded.”
Already feeling almost a murderer, I hastily handed the gun back to him.