The Secret History: Chapter 5

“Of course,” I said, unaccountably excited that the story was at last beginning to dovetail with my own experience.

When I first saw him alone, I broached it carefully, but he seemed satisfied with the deer story and I let it go at that.

I mean, there was no way our story could stand up to even peremptory examination and I knew it.

I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu—you’ve never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student—but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.

I was lucky, he said. No wonder I was having such a good time, since I could buy whatever I wanted, while all he could do was lie wheezing in the garret like a poor stepchild. I did what I could to placate him, but the more I bought him, the more he wanted.

He told me when they sent him off to Saint Jerome’s they didn’t even give him money for his schoolbooks. Rather an odd child-rearing method, in my opinion—like certain reptiles who hatch their young and abandon them to the elements. Not surprisingly, this has inculcated in Bunny the notion that it is more honorable to live by sponging off other people than it is to work.

“I’d rather have any job, six jobs, than beg from people. Look at you,” he said to me. “Your parents aren’t particularly generous with you, are they? But you’re so scrupulous about not borrowing money that it’s rather silly.”

“No,” said Henry and Francis, one on top of the other, with an alacrity that surprised me.

I felt sleepy, ill, as if this were some lingering and dyspeptic dream.

Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp...

My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.

My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.

“Have some dinner, won’t you?”
After a bit of awkward demurral, he pulled up a chair, though he refused to eat anything...

Henry, who generally disliked and was disliked by hoi polloi—a category which in his view expanded to include persons ranging from teenagers with boom boxes to the Dean of Studies of Hampden, who was independently wealthy and had a degree in American Studies from Yale—nonetheless had a genuine knack with poor people, simple people, country folk...

...he was despised by the functionaries of Hampden but admired by its janitors, its gardeners and cooks.

Monstrous as it was, the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry’s feet, to be discovered when the lights came up; the picture of it, staring and dumb in all its gore, never failed to provoke an anxious little frisson but still it seemed relatively harmless compared to the very real and persistent menace which I now saw that Bunny presented.

I was looking, obliquely, at Bunny slumped over his bowl when all of a sudden, in the window behind his head, I saw the distant figure of Mr. Hatch, walking across the open field beyond the garden, carrying the dark, curlicued ruins of the Malacca chair to the rubbish heap.

When the subject of the barge tour came up—and it came up fairly often—Henry played along in only the most perfunctory way, and his replies were mechanical and forced.

It seemed, for the most part, that he sublimated his anger towards Henry into his dealings with the rest of the world.

He threw a shoe at some hippies playing Hackysack outside his window; he threatened to beat up his neighbor for playing the radio too loudly; he called one of the ladies in the Bursar’s office a troglodyte.

If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger.

Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer.

Still, it never occurred to me that they weren’t genuinely fond of each other on some level, nor that Bunny’s gruff jokes concealed, however beguilingly, a keen and very pointed streak of malice toward Francis in particular.

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty.

Distasteful as his behavior was, we had seen it all before, only in less concentrated and vitriolic form.

Even in the happiest times he’d made fun of my California accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful bibelots, but in such an ingenuous way I couldn’t possibly do anything but laugh.

One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything.

This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.

To be honest, none of us, not even the brightest of us, were destined for academic achievement in subsequent years, Francis being too lazy, Charles too diffuse, and Henry too erratic and generally strange, a sort of Mycroft Holmes of classical philology.

Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack.

Fear for our own lives might have induced us to lead him to the gallows and slip the noose around his neck, but a more urgent impetus was necessary to make us actually go ahead and kick out the chair.

He was always disappearing on mysterious errands, and perhaps these were only more of the same; but now, anxious to believe that someone, at least, had the situation in hand, I imbued them with a certain hopeful significance.

Not that Edmund is profligate, but really, he’s one of the least morally concerned boys I’ve ever known.

Toward the fringe of the wood, the young trees were yellow with the first tinge of new leaves; woodpeckers laughed and drummed in the copses and, lying in bed with my window open, I could hear the rush and gurgle of the melted snow running in the gutters all night long.

The story he told was drunken and garbled, out of sequence and full of vituperative, self-righteous digressions; but I had no problem understanding it.

I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man’s float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

“Oh my God,” said Charles, disconcerted.

Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye.

The windows of the reading room were bright and blank; bookshelves, empty carrels, not a soul.

There was a rustle and a slight, deprecating cough from the direction of the woods.