The Go-Between Read Online Free PDF Page A

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;