The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

or
anything when you see him, or it will put him off. He doesn’t like
you to feel sorry for him. You see, he was wounded in the war and
his face hasn’t got right. They say it never will.”
      “Hard cheese, “I said.
      “Yes, but you mustn’t say so to him, or to Marian
either.”
      “Why not?”
      “Mama wouldn’t like it.”
      “Why not?” I said again.
      “Promise you won’t tell anybody—not even under
torture.”
      I promisedr
      “Mama wants Marian to marry him.”
      I digested this news in silence. It was extremely
disagreeable to me. I already felt violently jealous of Trimingham,
and the fact that he was a war hero did not recommend him to me. My
father had disapproved of the war, to the point of being a
pro-Boer. I was quite capable of lending my voice to “The Soldiers
of the Queen” and “Good-bye, Dolly, I Must Leave You,” and had gone
almost mad with excitement at the relief of Ladysmith; but I
believed that my father was right. Perhaps Trimingham deserved to
be disfigured. And why should Mrs. Maudsley want Marian to marry a
man who was horribly ugly and not even a Mr. ?
      We were crossing the meadow on a raised causeway
towards a curved line of rushes; the curve was concave, and we were
aiming for the farthest part. It was one of those sedgy, marshy
places in Norfolk where bog-cotton grows; despite the heat, which
was drying up everything, one had to pick one’s way, to avoid the
pools of reddish water that were half concealed by grass. Squelch,
squelch, and a brown trickle came over my low shoes.
      There was a black thing ahead of us, all bars and
spars and uprights, like a gallows. It gave out a sense of
fear—also of intense solitude. It was like something that must not
be approached, that might catch you and hurt you; I wondered why we
were walking towards it so unconcernedly. We had nearly reached it,
and I saw how the pitch was peeling off its surfaces, and realized
that no one could have attended to it for years, when suddenly the
head and shoulders of a man rose from among the rushes. He had his
back to us and did not hear us. He walked slowly up the steps to
the platform between the wheels and pulleys. He walked very slowly,
in the exultation of being alone; he moved his arms about and
hunched his shoulders, as if to give himself more freedom, though
he was wearing nothing that could have cramped him: for a moment I
thought that he was naked.
      He stood almost motionless for a second or two, just
raising his heels experimentally; and then he threw his hands up,
stretched himself into an arc, and disappeared. Until I heard the
splash I hadn’t realized how near the river was.
      The grown-ups stared at one another in dismay, and
we at them. Dismay turned to indignation. “What cheek!” said Denys.
“I thought we had the whole place to ourselves. He must know he’s
trespassing. What shall we do? Shall we order him off?”
      “He can’t go quite as he is,” the other man
said.
      “Well, shall we give him five minutes to clear
out?”
      “Whatever you do, I’m going to change,” said Marian.
“It takes me a long time. Come along, Eulalie” (this was her
friend’s strange name), “there’s our bathing-machine—it’s better
than it looks,” and she pointed to a hut among the rushes, which,
like so many huts, had the appearance of a disused hen-coop. They
went off, leaving us to face the situation.
      We looked at each other irresolutely and then by
common consent pushed through the rushes to the river bank. The
river had been hidden until now.
      At once the landscape changed. The river dominated
it— the two rivers, I might say, for they seemed like different
streams.
      Above the sluice, by which we stood, the river came
out of the shadow of the belt of trees. Green, bronze, and golden
it flowed through weeds and rushes; the gravel glinted, I could see
the fishes darting in the shallows. Below the sluice it