Maradick at Forty: A Transition

by Hugh Walpole

Her voice was thin and sharp like a child’s. But he suddenly leaned forward and took her in his arms; he crushed her against him so that she could feel his heart beating against her like a great hammer. He turned her head roughly with his hand and bent down and kissed her. His mouth met hers as though it would never go.

She could not breathe, she was stifled—then suddenly he drew back; he almost let her fall back. She saw him bend down and pick up his hat, and he had turned the corner of the path and was gone.

He did not know how he left the garden. He did not see it or realise it, but suddenly he found himself in the stretch of cornfield that reached, a yellow band, from horizon to horizon. The field ran down the hill, and the little path along which he stumbled crept in and out across the top of the slope. Below the corn was the distant white road, and curving round to the left was the little heap of white cottages that stand, stupidly, almost timidly, at the water’s edge. Then beyond that again was the wide blue belt of the sea. The corn was dark brown like burnt sugar at the top and a more golden yellow as it turned trembling to the ground. The scarlet poppies were still split in pools and lakes and rivers across its breast, and it seemed to have caught some of their colour in its darker gold.

Still not knowing what he was doing, he sat down heavily on a little green mound above the path and looked with stupid, half-closed eyes at the colour beneath him. He did not take it in, his heart was still beating furiously; every now and again his throat moved convulsively, his hands were white against his knee.

But, through his dazed feelings, he knew that he was glad for what he had done. Very glad! A kind of strange triumph at having really done it! There was something pounding, drumming through his veins that was new—a furious excitement that had never been there before.

He felt no shame or regret or even alarm at possible consequences. He did not think for an instant of Mrs. Maradick or the girls. His body, the muscles and the nerves, the thick arms, the bull neck, the chest like a rock—those were the parts of him that were glad, furiously glad. He was primeval, immense, sitting there on the little green hill with the corn and the sea and the world at his feet.

He did not see the world at all, but there passed before his eyes, like pictures on a shining screen, some earlier things that had happened to him and had given him that same sense of furious physical excitement. He saw himself, a tiny boy, in a hard tight suit of black on a Sunday afternoon in their old home at Rye. Church bells were ringing somewhere, and up the twisting, turning cobbles of the street grave couples were climbing. The room in which he was hung dark and gloomy about him, and he was trying to prevent himself from slipping off the shiny horsehair chair on which he sat, his little black-stockinged legs dangling in the air. In his throat was the heavy choking sensation of the fat from the midday dinner beef. On the stiff sideboard against the wall were ranged little silver dishes containing sugar biscuits and rather dusty little chocolates; on the opposite side of the room, in a heavy gilt frame, was the stern figure of his grandmother, with great white wristbands and a sharp pointed nose.

He was trying to learn his Sunday Collect, and he had been forbidden to speak until he had learnt it; his eyes were smarting and his head was swimming with weariness, and every now and again he would slip right forward on the shiny chair. The door opened and a gentleman entered, a beautiful, wonderful gentleman, with a black bushy beard and enormous limbs; the gentleman laughed and caught him up in his arms, the prayer-book fell with a clatter to the floor as he buried his curly head in the beard. He did not know now, looking back, who the gentleman had been, but that moment stood out from the rest of his life with all its details as something wonderful, magic. . . .

And then, later—perhaps he was about fifteen, a rather handsome, shy boy—and he was in an orchard. The trees were heavy with flowers, and the colours, white and pink, swung with the wind in misty clouds above his head. Over the top of the old red-brown wall a girl’s face was peeping. He climbed an old gnarled tree that hung across the wall and bent down towards her; their lips met, and as he leaned towards her the movement of his body shook the branches and the petals fell about them in a shower. He had forgotten the name of the little girl, it did not matter, but the moment was there.

And then again, later still, was the moment when he had first seen Mrs. Maradick. It had been at some evening function or other, and she had stood with her shining shoulders under some burning brilliant lights that swung from the ceiling. Her dress had been blue, a very pale blue; and at the thought of the blue dress his head suddenly turned, the corn swam before him and came in waves to meet him, and then receded, back to the sky-line.