And the driver climbed to his seat with a grin.
Only this old boy couldn’t climb if he were paid for it. I wonder how he gets up to his box in the morning. I expect they lift him, you know; his old wife and the children and the grandchildren—a kind of ceremony.”
They were being flung about all this time like peas in a bladder, and Tony had to talk at the top of his voice to make himself heard. “Anyhow he’ll get us there all right, I expect. My word, what rain! I say, you know, I can’t in the very least realise it. It seems most frightfully exciting, but it’s all so easy, in a kind of way. You see I haven’t even had to have a bag or anything, because there’ll be heaps of time to stop in town and get things. And to-morrow morning to see the sun rise over Paris, with Janet!”
His eyes were on fire with excitement. But to Maradick this weather, this cab, seemed horrible, almost ominous. He was flung against the side of the window, then against Tony, then back again. He had lost his breath.
But he had realised something else suddenly; he wondered how he could have been so foolish as not to have seen it before, and that was, that this would be probably, indeed almost certainly, the last time that he would have Tony to himself. The things that the boy had been to him during these weeks beat in his head like bells, reminding him. Why, the boy had been everything to him! And now he saw suddenly that he had, in reality, been nothing at all to the boy. Tony’s eyes were set on the adventure—the great adventure of life. Maradick, and others like him, might be amusing on the way; were of course, “good sorts,” but they could be left, they must be left if one were to get on, and there were others, plenty of others.
And so, in that bumping cab, Maradick suddenly realised his age. To be “at forty” as the years go was nothing, years did not count, but to be “at forty” in the way that he now saw it was the great dividing line in life. He now saw that it wasn’t for him any more to join with those who were “making life,” that was for the young, and they would have neither time nor patience to wait for his slower steps; he must be content to play his part in other people’s adventures, to act the observer, the onlooker. Those young people might tell him that they cared, that they wanted him, but they would soon forget, they would soon pass on until they too were “at forty,” and, reluctantly, unwillingly, must move over to the other camp.
He turned to Tony.
“I say, boy,” he said almost roughly, “this is the last bit that we shall have together; alone, I mean. I say, don’t forget me altogether afterwards. I want to come and see you.”
“Forget you!” Tony laughed. “Why never! I!”
But then suddenly the aged man and his coach bumped them together and then flung them apart and then bumped them again so that no more words were possible. The cab had turned the corner. The house, with its crooked door, was before them.