Maradick at Forty: A Transition

by Hugh Walpole

And so he had, of course he had. Why, it had made all the difference in his life. It was all very well his thinking, as he had that afternoon, that it was Tony or the place or Punch, one odd thing or another that had made him think like that, but, as a matter of fact, it was Mrs. Lester, and no one else. She had shown him all of it.

“No, you mustn’t think that of me,” he said; “I have taken it very seriously indeed.” He wanted to say more, but his head was so heavy that he couldn’t think, and he stopped.

Meanwhile she was wondering at her own position. She had come to him that evening in a state of pique. All day she had determined that she would not go. That was to be the end of an amusing little episode. And after all, he was only a great stupid hulk of a thing. He could crush her in his arms, but then so could any coalheaver. And she had got such a nice letter from Fred, the dear, that morning. He had missed her even during the day that he had been away. Oh yes! she wouldn’t see any more of Mr. Maradick!

But she would like to have just a word alone with him. She expected to see him at teatime. But no; Sir Richard and Rupert had seen him at the station and he had said that he was following them back. But no; well, then, at dinner. Neither Tony nor he were at dinner.

Oh well! he couldn’t care very much about her if he could stay away during the whole of their last day together! She was well out of it all. She read Fred’s letter a great many times and kissed it. Then directly after dinner—they were so dull downstairs, everyone seemed to have the acutest depression and kept on wondering where Tony was—she went to her room and started writing a long, long letter to her “little pet of a Fredikins”; at least it was going to be a long, long letter, and then somehow it would not go on.

Mr. Maradick was a beast. If he thought that he could just play fast and loose with women like that, do just what he liked with them, he was mightily mistaken. She flung down her pen. The room was stifling! She went to her window and opened it; she leaned out. Ah! how cool and refreshing the night air was. There was somebody in the distance playing something. It sounded like a flute or a pipe. How nice and romantic! She closed the window. After all, where was he? He must be somewhere all this time. She must speak to him just once before she went away. She must, even though it were only to tell him . . . Then she remembered that dusty, empty room upstairs. He had told her that he often went up there.

And so she came. That was the whole history of it. She hadn’t, when she came into the room, the very least idea of anything that she was going to do or say. Only that it was romantic, and that she had an extraordinarily urgent desire to be crushed once more in those very strong arms.

“I have taken it very seriously indeed.” He wondered, as he said it to her, what it was, exactly, that he had taken seriously. The “it” was very much more than simply Mrs. Lester; he saw that very clearly. She was only the expression of a kind of mood that he had been in during these last weeks, a kind of genuine atmosphere that she stood for, just as some quite simple and commonplace thing—a chair, a picture, a vase of flowers—sometimes stands for a great experience or emotion. And then—his head was clearer now; that led him to see further still.

He suddenly grasped that she wasn’t really for him a woman at all, that, indeed, she never had been. He hadn’t thought of her as the woman, the personal character and identity that he wanted, but simply as a sort of emotional climax to the experiences that he had been having; any other woman, he now suddenly saw, would have done just as well. And then, the crisis being over, the emotional situation being changed, the woman would remain; that would be the hell of it!

And that led him—all this in the swift interval before she answered him—to wonder whether she, too, had been wanting him also, not as a man, not as James Maradick, but simply as a cap to fit the mood that she was in: any man would fit as well. If that were the case with her as well as with him what a future they were spared by his suddenly seeing as clearly as he did. If that were not so, then the whole thing bristled with difficulties; but that was what he must set himself to find out, now, at once.