Maradick at Forty: A Transition

by Hugh Walpole

The curtain blew ever so slightly in the wind from the crevice of the door, and he watched it from his bed as it swelled and bulged and shrunk back as though it were longing to break away from the door altogether but had not quite courage enough. But although he was still confused and vague with the lazy bewilderment of sleep, he realised quite definitely in the back of his mind that there was some fact waiting for him until he should be clear-headed enough to recognise it. This certainty of something definite before him that had to be met and considered roused him. He did not, in the least, know what that something was that awaited him, but he tried to pull himself together. The sea receded, the beating of its waves was very faint in his ears, and the rocks resolved into the shining glass of the dressing-table and the solemn chairs with their backs set resolutely against the wall, and their expressions those of self-conscious virtue.

He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes; he knew with absolute certainty that he should not sleep again. The light was trying to pierce the blind and little eyes of colour winked at him from the window, the silver things on the dressing-table stood out, pools of white, against the dark wood.

He got out of bed, and suddenly the fact stared him in the face: it was that he was committed, irrevocably committed, to help Tony. He had, in a way, been committed before, ever since Lady Gale asked him for his help; but there had always been a chance of escaping, the possibility, indeed, of the “thing” never coming off at all. But now it was coming off, and very soon, and he had to help it to come.

He had turned the whole situation over in his mind so very often, and looked at it from so very many points of view, with its absurdities and its tragedies and its moralities, that there was nothing more to be said about the actual thing at all; that was, in all conscience, concrete enough. He saw it, as he sat on the bed swinging his feet, there in front of him, as some actual personality with whom he had pledged himself in league. He had sworn to help two children to elope against everybody’s wishes—he, Maradick, of all people the most law-abiding. What had come over him? However, there it was and there was nothing more to be said about it. It wasn’t to be looked at again at all with any view of its possible difficulties and dangers, it had just to be carried through.

But he knew, as he thought about it, that the issue was really much larger than the actual elopement. It was the effect on him that really mattered, the fact that he could never return to Epsom again with any hope of being able to live the life there that he had lived before.

The whole circle of them would be changed by this; it was the most momentous event in all their lives.

Maradick looked again at the morning. The mists were rising higher in the air, and all the colours, the pale golden sand, the red roofs, the brown bend of the rocks, were gleaming in the sun. He would go and bathe and then search out Punch.

It was a quarter past five as he passed down the stairs; the house was in the most perfect stillness, and only the ticking of innumerable clocks broke the silence. Suddenly a bird called from the garden; a little breath of wind, bringing with it the scent of pinks and roses, trembled through the hall.

When he reached the cove the sea was like glass. He had never bathed early in the morning before, and a few weeks ago he would have laughed at the idea. A man of his age bathing at half-past five in the morning! The water would be terribly cold. But it wasn’t. He thought that he had never known anything so warm and caressing as he lay back in it and looked up through the clear green. There was perfect silence. Things came into his mind, some operas that he had heard, rather reluctantly, that year in London. The opening of the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” with the bell-music and the light breaking over the city. He remembered that he had thought that rather fine at the time. The lovers in “Louise” on Montmartre watching the lights burst the flowers below them and saluting “Paris!” He had appreciated that too. A scene in “To Paradise,” with a man somewhere alone in a strange city watching the people hurrying past him and counting the lamps that swung, a golden chain, down the street. Some picture in the Academy of that year, Sim’s “Night Piece to Julia.” He hadn’t understood it or seen anything in it at the time. “One of those new fellows who just stick the paint on anyhow,” he had remarked; but now he seemed to remember a wonderful blue dress and a white peacock in the background!

How funny it was, he thought, as he plunged, dripping, back on to the beach, that the things that a fellow scarcely noticed at all at the time should be just the things that came into his mind afterwards. And on the sand he saw Toby, the dog, gravely watching him. Toby came courteously towards him, sniffed delicately at his socks, and then, having decided apparently that they were the right kind of socks and couldn’t really be improved on, sat down with his head against Maradick’s leg.