Maradick at Forty: A Transition

by Hugh Walpole

The house was the cleverest in the world. There was nothing in Europe of its kind, and that was because its cleverness lay in the fact that you never thought it clever at all. It could, most amazingly, disappear so utterly and entirely that you never had any thoughts about it at all, and merely accepted it without discussion as a perfect background. And then, suddenly, on a morning or an evening, it would leap out at you and catch you by the throat; and the traveller wondered and was aghast at its most splendid adaptability.

It was, indeed, all things to all men; but it nevertheless managed to bring out the best parts of them. All those strange people that it had seen—painters and musicians, the aristocracy and old maids, millionaires and the tumbled wastrels cast out from a thousand cities—it gathered them all, and they left it, even though they had passed but a night in its company, altered a little. And it achieved this by its adaptability. In its rooms and passages, its gardens and sudden corners, its grey lights and green lawns, there was that same secret waiting for an immediate revelation. Some thought the house a tyranny, and others called it a surprise, and a few felt that it was an impossibility, but no one disregarded it.

For Maradick, in these strange new days into which he was entering, its charm lay in its age. That first view with the dark, widening staircase that passed into hidden lights and mysteries overhead and turned so nobly towards you the rich gleam of its dark brown oak, the hall with its wide fireplace and passages that shone, as all true passages should, like little cups of light and shadow, grey and blue and gold, before vanishing into darkness—this first glimpse had delighted him; it was a hall that was a perfect test of the arriving visitor, and Maradick had felt that he himself had been scarcely quite the right thing. It was almost as though he ought to have apologised for the colourless money-making existence that had hitherto been his; he had felt this vaguely and had been a little uncomfortable. But there were things higher up that were better still. There were rooms that had, most wisely, been untouched, and their dark, mysterious panelling, the wistful scent of dried flowers and the wax of dying candles; the suggestion—so that he held his breath sometimes to listen whether it were really so—of rustling brocades and the tiny click of shining heels on the polished floor, was of a quite unequalled magic for him. Of course there was imagination in it, and in the last few days these things had grown and extended their influence over him, but there must have been something there before, he argued, to impress so matter-of-fact and solid a gentleman.

There was one room that drew him with especial force, so that sometimes, before going to bed, he would enter with his candle raised high above his head, and watch the shadow on the floor and the high gloom of the carved ceiling. It contained a little minstrels gallery supported on massive pillars of gleaming oak, and round the bottom of the platform were carved the heads of grinning lions, reminding one of that famous Cremona violin of Herr Prespil’s. In the centre of the room was an old table with a green baize cloth, and against the wall, stiffly ranged and dusty from disuse, high-backed quaintly carved chairs, but for the rest no carpet and no pictures on the dark, thick walls.

It was sometimes used for dancing, and at times for a meeting or a sale of work; or perchance, if there were gentlemen musically inclined, for chamber music. But it was empty during half the year, and no one disturbed its dust; it reminded Maradick of that tower in the market-place. They were, both of them, melancholy survivals, but he applauded their bravery in surviving at all, and he had almost a personal feeling for them in that he would have liked them to know that there was, at least, one onlooker who appreciated their being there.

There were rooms and passages in the upper part of the house that were equally delightful and equally solitary. He himself had in his former year at Treliss thought them melancholy and dusty; there had been no charm. But now the room of the minstrels had drawn him frequently to its doors, partly by reason of its power of suggestion—the valuation, for him, of light and sound and colour, in their true and most permanent qualities—partly by the amazing view that its deep-set windows provided. It hung forward, as it were, over the hill, so that the intervening space of garden and tower and wood was lost and there was only the sea. It seemed to creep to the very foot of the walls, and the horizon of it was so distant that it swept into infinite space, meeting the sky without break or any division. The height of the room gave the view colour, so that there were deeper blues and greens in the sea, and in the sky the greys and whites were shot with other colours that the mists of the intervening air had given them.

In these last few days Maradick had watched the view with ever-increasing wonder. The sea had been to him before something that existed for the convenience of human beings—a means of transit, a pleasant place to bathe, sands for the children, and the pier for an amusing walk. Now he felt that these things were an impertinence. It seemed to him that the sea permitted them against its will, and would, one day, burst its restraint and pour in overwhelming fury on to that crowd of nurses and nigger-minstrels and parasols; he almost hoped that it would.

Loneliness was, however, largely responsible for this change of view. There had been no one this time at the hotel to whom he had exactly taken. There had been men last year whom he had liked, excellent fellows. They had come there for the golf and he had seen a good deal of them. There might be some of the same kind now, but for some reason, unanalysed and very mistily grasped, he did not feel drawn towards them.

The Saturday of the end of that week was a terribly hot day, and after lunch he had gone to his room, pulled down his blinds, and slumbered over a novel. The novel was by a man called Lester; he had made his name several years before with “The Seven Travellers,” a work that had succeeded in pleasing both critics and public. It was now in its tenth edition. Maradick had been bored by “The Seven Travellers”; it had seemed effete and indefinite. They were, he had thought, always travelling and never getting there, and he had put it down unfinished. The man knew nothing of life at first hand, and the characters were too obviously concerned in their own emotions to arouse any very acute ones in the reader. But this one, “To Paradise,” was better. If the afternoon had not been so very hot it might even have kept him awake. The characters were still effete and indefinite, motives were still crudely handled and things were vague and obscure, but there was something in its very formlessness that was singularly pleasing. And it was beautiful, there was no doubt about that; little descriptions of places and people that were charming not only for themselves but also for the suggestions that they raised.

When he woke it was nearly four o’clock. He remembered that he had promised his wife to come down to tea. She had met the Gales the day before and they were coming to tea, and he had to be useful. There were a good many little drawing-rooms in the hotel, so that you could ask more people to tea than your own room would conveniently hold, and nevertheless be, to all intents and purposes, private.