Read The Go-Between for Free Online Page B

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 su-perstitiousness 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,