Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  “I wonder,” said Lady Gale, “if that is one of the Bassetts of Hindhurst. There was a Captain Bassett — —”

  Maradick watched the golden curtain of gorse. The scent came to him; bees hummed in the air.

  “Well, I like being by the sea, you know. But to be on it; I’ve crossed the Atlantic seven times and been ill every time. There is a stuff called — Oh! I forget — Yansfs. Yes, you can’t pronounce it — You-are-now-secure-from-sea-sickness — it wasn’t any good as far as I was concerned, but then I think you ought to take it before — —”

  This was his wife.

  Mrs. Lester suddenly spoke to him. “You are very silent, Mr. Maradick. Take me for a stroll some time, won’t you? No, not now. I’m lazy, but later.”

  She turned away from him before he could reply, and leaned over to her husband. Then he saw that Tony was at his elbow.

  “Come down and bathe,” the boy said, “now. No, it isn’t bad for you, really. That’s all tommy-rot. Besides, we mayn’t be able to get away later.” They left the tent together.

  “Is it champagne?” he asked.

  “What?” asked Tony.

  “All this amiability. I was as gruff as a — as my ordinary self — coming, and then suddenly I could have played a penny whistle; why?”

  “Oh! I don’t know!” said Tony, flinging his arms about. “I’m much too happy to care. Maradick, I’ve been seeing her, here in the gorse — wonderful — divine. We will go back to-morrow; yes, we must. Of course you’ve got to come. As to everybody’s good temper, that doesn’t mean anything. The spirits of the place have their games, you know, and there we are. Everybody will be awfully cross at tea. And you know it is cheek! For us all to go and plant our tent and eat our chicken in the middle of a view like this. And they’ll leave paper bags about, and they’ll pop ginger-beer. I don’t mind betting that the gods play some games before they’ve done with us.”

  They climbed down the rocks to a little cove that lay nestling under the brow of the hill. The sand was white, with little sparkles in it where the sun caught the pebbles; everything was coloured with an intensity that hurt the eye. The cove was hemmed in by brown rocks; a little bird hopped along the sand, then rose with a little whirl of pleasure above their heads and disappeared.

  They flung off their clothes with an entire disregard of possible observers. A week ago Maradick would have died rather than do such a thing; a bathing-machine and a complete bathing-suit had been absolute essentials, now they really never entered his head. If he had thought of it at all, they would have seemed to him distinctly indecent, a kind of furtive winking of the eye, an eager disavowal of an immorality that was never there at all.

  As Maradick felt the water about his body his years fell from him like Pilgrim’s pack. He sank down, with his eyes for a moment on the burning sky, and then gazing through depths of green water. As he cleaved it with his arm it parted and curled round his body like an embrace; for a moment he was going down and down and down, little diamond bubbles flying above him, then he was up again, and, for an instant, the dazzling white of the cove, the brown of the rocks, the blue of the sky, encircled him. Then he lay on his back and floated. His body seemed to leave him, and he was something utterly untrammelled and free; there were no Laws, no Creeds, no Arguments, nothing but a wonderful peace and contentment, an absolute union with something that he had been searching for all his life and had never found until now.

  “Obey we Mother Earth . . . Mother Earth.” He lay, smiling, on her breast. Little waves came and danced beneath him, touching his body with a caress as they passed him; he rose and fell, a very gentle rocking, as of some mother with her child. He could not think, he could remember nothing; he only knew that he had solved a riddle.

  Then he struck out to sea. Before him it seemed to spread without end or limit; it was veiled in its farthest distance by a thin purple haze, and out of this curtain the blue white-capped waves danced in quick succession towards him. He struck out and out, and as he felt his body cut through the water a great exultation rose in him that he was still so strong and vigorous. Every part of him, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, seemed clean and sound and sane. Oh! Life! with its worries and its dirty little secrets and its petty moralities! and the miserable pessimistic sauntering in a melancholy twilight through perpetual graveyards! Let them swim, let them swim!

  He shouted to Tony, “It’s great. One could go on for ever!” He dived for a moment downward, and saw the great white curve of his body from his foot to the hip, the hard smooth strength of the flesh.

  Then he turned slowly back. The white beach, the brown rocks, and the blue sky held out hands to him.

  “All those people,” he shouted to Tony, “up there, eating, sleeping, when they might be in this!” Mrs. Lester, he knew, would have liked it. He thought for a moment of his wife, the dresses she would need and the frills. He could see her stepping delicately from the bathing-machine; her little scream as her feet touched the water, “Oh Jim! it’s cold!” He laughed as he waded back on to the beach. The pebbles burnt hot under his feet, and the sand clung to his toes; he dug his legs deep into it. The sun curled about his body and wrapped him, as it were, in a robe of its own glorious colour. He could feel it burning on his back.

  Tony joined him, panting. “Oh! my word! I’ve never had such a bathe, never! I could have stayed in for ever! But they’d be coming to look for us, and that wouldn’t do. I say, run round with me! I’ll beat you five times round.”

  They raced round the beach. The sun, the wind, and the waves seemed to go with them; the water fell from them as they ran, and at last they flung themselves dry and breathless on to the hot sand.

  Whilst they dressed, Tony dealt with the situation more practically and in detail.

  “There are going to be a lot of difficulties, I’m afraid,” he said, as he stood with his shirt flapping about his legs, and his hands struggling with his collar. “In the first place, there’s mother. As I told you, she’s not got to know anything about it, because the minute she hears anything officially, of course, she’ll have to step in and ask about it, and then there’ll be no end of trouble with the governor and everybody. It’s not that she disapproves really, you know — your being there makes that all right; but she hasn’t got to realise it until it’s done. She won’t ask anything about it, but of course she can’t help wondering.”

  “Well, I hope it is all right,” said Maradick anxiously. “My being a kind of moral danger-signal makes one nervous.”

  “Oh! she trusts you,” said Tony confidently. “That’s why it’s so perfectly splendid your being there. And then,” went on Tony, “they are all of them wondering what we are at. You see, Treliss has that effect on people, or at any rate it’s having that kind of effect on us here and now. Everybody is feeling uneasy about something, and they are most of them putting it down to me. Things always do happen when you jumble a lot of people together in a hotel, the gods can’t resist a game; and when you complicate it by putting them in Treliss! My word!”

  “Well, what’s the immediate complication?” asked Maradick. The water had made his hair curl all over his head, and his shirt was open at the neck and his sleeves rolled up over his arms.

  “Well, the most immediate one,” said Tony slowly, “is Alice, Miss Du Cane. She was talking to me before lunch. It’s rather caddish to say anything about it, but I tell you everything, you know. Well, she seemed to think I’d been neglecting her and was quite sick about it. She never is sick about anything, because she’s much too solid, and so I don’t know what’s set her off this time. She suspects a lot.”

  Maradick said nothing.

  “But the funny thing is that they should worry at all. Before, when I’ve done anything they’ve always said, ‘Oh! Tony again!’ and left it at that. Now, when I’ve done nothing, they all go sniffing round.”

  “Yes,” said Maradick, “that’s the really funny thing; that nothing has been done for them
to sniff at, yet. I suppose, as a matter of fact, people have got so little to do in a hotel that they worry about nothing just to fill up time.”

  He stretched his arms and yawned.

  “No,” said Tony, “it’s the place. Whom the gods wish to send mad they first send to Treliss. It’s in the air. Ask that old fellow, Morelli.”

  “Why Morelli?” Maradick asked quickly.

  “Well, it’s absurd of me,” said Tony. “But I don’t mind betting that he knows all about it. He’s uncanny; he knows all about everything. It’s just as if he set us all dancing to his tune like the Pied Piper.” He laughed. “Just think! all of us dancing; you and I, mother, father, Alice, Rupert, the Lesters, Mrs. Maradick, Mrs. Lawrence — and Janet!” he added suddenly.

  “Janet,” he said, catching Maradick’s arm and walking up the beach. “Can’t you see her dancing? that hair and those eyes! Janet!”

  “I’m sleepy,” said Maradick unsympathetically. “I shall lie with my head in the gorse and snore.”

  He was feeling absolutely right in every part of his body; his blood ran in his veins like a flame. He hummed a little tune as he climbed the path.

  “Why! that’s Morelli’s tune,” said Tony, “I’d been trying to remember it; the tune he played that night,” and then suddenly they saw Mrs. Lester.

  She sat on a rock that had been cut into a seat in the side of the hill. She could not see the beach immediately below because the cliff projected in a spreading cloud of gorse, but the sea lay for miles in front of her, and the gold of the hill struck sharp against the blue. She herself sat perched on the stone, the little wind blowing her hair about her face. She was staring out to sea and did not see them until they were right upon her.

  Tony shouted “Hullo, Milly,” and she turned.

  “We have been bathing,” he said. “It was the most stupendous bathe that there has ever been.” Then he added, “Why are you alone?”

  “The rest went to see a church on a hill or something, but I didn’t want anything except the view; but Lady Gale is still there, at the tent. She told me to tell you if I saw you to come to her.”

  “Right you are.” He passed singing up the hill. Maradick stood in front of her, his cap in his hand, then she made room for him on her seat and he sat beside her.

  “A view like this,” she said, “makes one want very much to be good. I don’t suppose that you ever want to be anything else.”

  “There’s some difference between wanting and being,” he answered sententiously. “Besides, I don’t suppose I’m anything real, neither good nor bad, just indifferent like three-fourths of the human race.”

  He spoke rather bitterly, and she looked at him. “I think you’re anything but indifferent,” she said, nodding her head. “I think you’re delightful. You’re just one of the big, strong, silent men of whom novels are full; and I’ve never met one before. I expect you could pick me up with one finger and hurl me into the sea. Women like that, you know.”

  “You needn’t be afraid that I shall do it,” he said, laughing. “I have been bathing and am as weak as a kitten; and that also accounts for my untidiness,” he added. He had been carrying his coat over his shoulder, and his shirt was open at the neck and his sleeves rolled up over his arms.

  They did not speak again for several minutes. She was looking at the view with wide-open, excited eyes.

  Then she turned round and laid her hand upon his arm. “Oh! I don’t expect you’ve needed it as I have done,” she said, “all this colour; I’m drinking it in and storing it so that I can fill all the drab days that are coming with it. Drab, dull, stupid days; going about and seeing people you don’t want to see, doing things you don’t want to do, saying things you don’t want to say.”

  “Why do you?” he said.

  “Oh! one has to. One can’t expect to be at Treliss for ever. It’s really bad for one to come here, because it always makes one discontented and unsettles one. Last year,” she smiled at the recollection, “was most unsettling.”

  “Well,” he answered, “I’ve got to go back to the office, you know. It will do me good to have these days to remember.”

  She was silent again; then the grasp on his arm tightened and she said —

  “Oh! Mr. Maradick, I am so unhappy.”

  He moved a little away from her. Here were more confidences coming! Why had all the world suddenly taken it into its incautious head to trust him with its secrets? He! Maradick! whom no one had ever dreamt of trusting with anything before?

  “No, I don’t want to bother you. It won’t bother you, will it? Only it is such a rest and a comfort to be able to tell some one.” She spoke with a little catch in her voice, but she was thinking of the year before when she had trusted Captain Stanton, “dear old Reggie,” with similar confidences; and there had been Freddie Stapylton before that. Well, they had all been very nice about it, and she was sure that this big man with the brown neck and the curly hair would be just as nice.

  “No, but you will be a friend of mine, won’t you?” she said. “A woman wants a friend, a good, sensible, strong friend to whom she can tell things, and I have nobody. It will be such a comfort if I can talk to you sometimes.”

  “Please,” he said.

  Providence seemed to have designed him as a kind of general nursemaid to a lot of irresponsible children.

  “Ah! that’s good of you.” She gave a little sigh and stared out to sea. “Of course, I’m not complaining, other women have had far worse times, I know that; but it is the loneliness that hurts so. If there is only one person who understands it all it will make such a difference.”

  Mrs. Lester was not at all insincere. She liked Maradick very much, and her having liked Captain Stanton and Mr. Stapylton before him made no difference at all. Those others had been very innocent flirtations and no harm whatever had come of them, and then Treliss was such an exciting place that things always did happen. It must also be remembered that she had that morning quarrelled with her husband.

  “You see,” she said, “I suppose I was always rather a romantic girl. I loved colour and processions and flowers and the Roman Catholic Church. I used to go into the Brompton Oratory and watch the misty candles and listen to them singing from behind the altars and sniff the incense. And then I read Gautier and Merimée and anything about Spain. And then I went to Italy, and I thought I could never leave it with the dear donkeys and Venice and carnivals, but we had to get back for Ascot. Oh! I suppose it was all very silly and like lots of other girls, but it was all very genuine, Mr. Maradick.”

  He nodded his head.

  “It’s so sweet of you to understand,” she said. “Well, like most girls, I crowded all these dreams into marriage. That was going to do everything for me. Oh! he was to be such a hero, and I was to be such a wife to him. Dear me! How old it makes one feel when one thinks of those girlish days!”

  But Maradick only thought that she looked very young indeed, Tony’s age.

  “Then I read some of Fred’s essays; Mr. Lester, you know. They used to come out in the Cornhill, and I thought them simply wonderful. They said all that I had been thinking, and they were full of that colour that I loved so. The more I read them the more I felt that here was my hero, the man whom I could worship all my days. Poor old Fred, fancy my thinking that about him.”

  Maradick thought of Mr. Lester trailing with bent back and languid eye over the gorse, and wondered too.

  “Well, then I met him at a party; one of those literary parties that I used to go to. He was at his best that night and he talked wonderfully. We were introduced, and — well, there it all was. It all happened in a moment. I couldn’t in the least tell you how; but I woke one morning and, like Mr. Somebody or other, a poet I think, found myself married.”

  Here there was a dramatic pause. Maradick didn’t know what to say. He felt vaguely that sympathy was needed, but it was difficult to find the right words.

  “That changed me,” Mrs. Lester went on in a low vo
ice with a thrill in it, “from an innocent warm-hearted girl into a woman — a suffering, experienced woman. Oh! Mr. Maradick, you know what marriage is, the cage that it can be; at least, if you haven’t experienced it, and I sincerely hope you haven’t, you can imagine what it is. A year of it was enough to show me how cruel life was.”

  Maradick felt a little uncomfortable. His acquaintance with Mrs. Lester had been a short one, and in a little time he was going back to have tea with Mr. Lester; he had seemed a harmless kind of man.

  “I am very sorry — —” he began.

  “Oh, please,” she went on quickly, “don’t think that I’m unhappy. I don’t curse fate or do anything silly like that. I suppose there are very few persons who find marriage exactly what they expect it to be. I don’t complain. But oh! Mr. Maradick, never marry an author. Of course you can’t — how silly of me! — but I should like you to understand a little what I have felt about it all.”

  He tried clumsily to find words.

  “All of us,” he said, “must discover as we get on that things aren’t quite what we thought they would be. And of marriage especially. One’s just got to make up one’s mind to it. And then I think there’s a lot to be grateful for if there’s only one person, man or woman, to whom one matters; who, well, sticks to one and — —”

  “Oh! I know,” she sighed reminiscently.

  “What I mean is that it doesn’t so much matter what that person is, stupid or ugly or anything, if they really care. There isn’t so much of that steady affection going about in the world that we can afford to disregard it when it comes. Dear me!” he added with a laugh, “how sentimental I am!”

  “I know,” she said eagerly. “That’s just it; if Fred did care like that, oh dear, how wonderful it would be! But he doesn’t. I don’t really exist for him at all. He thinks so much about his books and the people in them that real people aren’t there. At first I thought that I could help him with his work, read to him and discuss it with him; and I know that there were a lot of grammatical mistakes, but he wouldn’t let me do anything. He shut me out. I was no use to him at all.”