Lady Sunningdale had few habits, and was thus very adaptable, but one
was to make a punctual first appearance half an hour before luncheon.
Her appearance, though long-delayed, was brilliant when it came, and it
was as if a fresh and many-coloured sun had arisen to take the shine out
of the splendour of the noon-day. Years were the only things in which
she was no longer young, but the youthfulness of her mind, tastes,
character was perfectly spontaneous and natural, and she still retained
to the full all the eager curiosity of youth, all youth’s insatiable
appetite for pleasure. In person she was very tall and largely made, but
she moved with exquisite briskness and vigour, and, though stout, still
clung to her waist. Her hat generally contained a perfect aviary of
birds perched about on it, and her dresses to match her tastes were
rather youthful in cut and colour. She wore also white satin shoes with
extremely high heels, which had been known, when she walked in wet or
clayey places, to be drawn with a cloop, like the drawing of a cork,
completely off her feet, the heel being driven into the ground by her
weight in the manner of a nail. But, as a rule, she avoided clayey
places; indeed, she seldom walked at all, except at this stated time,
half an hour before luncheon. But she made up for her lack of walking by
talking; this she did on all occasions to as many people as possible,
and was extremely entertaining.
She was staying now (she spent the greater part of her life in staying)
for a rather extensive weekend, that is to say from Friday till Monday,
with Lord Flintshire, and the morning after her arrival came radiantly
downstairs at a quarter-past one. Two irrepressible dachshunds barked
excitedly round her, and as she stepped on to the terrace where her host
was sitting, she was trying, without the least success, to put up a
pale-blue sunshade with a handle of Saxe-china.
“Dear Flints,” she cried, “how sweet of you to wait for me! Where is
everybody? Yes. Isn’t it a divine morning? Everything looks as if it had
been washed during the night. Why is one such a fool as ever to leave
the country and go to London? If one had a single spark of originality
one would never go near it. Yes. Please put up my sunshade for me. I
know I look hideous this morning; but it doesn’t matter how one looks in
the country, which is another of its charms. But I didn’t sleep a
wink,--I never close my eyes in the country; really, London is the place
to live in. I have contradicted myself, have I not? Who cares? I’m sure
I don’t. Where are the dogs? Please whistle on your fingers, if you can.
So piercing, is it not? There they are! Ah, how naughty! Yes, who cares
whether one contradicts one’s self? It shews, in fact, that one’s powers
of sympathy and of seeing other points of view are defective, unless one
sees both sides of every question, and upholds both vehemently. Yes, do
let us walk down the terrace. I adore walking. Oh, Suez Canal, running
over the flower-beds like that! How naughty!”
“Suez Canal?” interpolated Lord Flintshire, who, walking by her side,
looked like a small rowing-boat towed by a brig in full sail.
“Yes, don’t you see how dreadfully long he is? Now tell me all about
your brother who dined here last night. I thought him too fascinating,
and we had a great talk about somebody called Kennet, I think he said.
Mr. Chancellor is very high-church, is he not? His mouth looked to me
high-church. There is something perfectly beautiful about high-church
mouths. Look at Lady Otterbourne’s: her mouth is exactly like your
brother’s. So is the Bishop of Tavistock’s, whom I adore. He plays the
flute divinely, looking funnier than anything I ever saw--so funny that
I never want to laugh. Somehow a bishop playing on a flute--or do I mean
low-church? I think I must mean low-church. And so your brother is
Martin’s father. I sent a message by him last night to tell Martin to
come and see me this afternoon. I completely lost my heart to Martin
last winter. It is terrible to lose one’s heart when one is fifty,
because one has already lost one’s looks, so that it leaves one really
denuded. Besides it seems so careless. That is a chestnut, I think. But
everything worth saying has been said years before even I was born.
Where is Suez? Naughty!”
Lady Sunningdale’s conversation flowed in the manner of a river in
flood; it flowed over everything, it foamed and spouted, and there was
always the sense--never left unjustified--that there was plenty more to
come. It flowed, in fact, over so many different subjects that her
interlocutor had a practically limitless range of topics from which to
select the matter of his reply; on the other hand, he could fly off on
any tangent of his own without initiating incongruity, or, again, he
could be silent, completely confident that Lady Sunningdale would go on.
But the last topic suited Lord Flintshire very well.
“Do tell me what you think of Martin,” he said.
“But too fascinating and a genius. That combination is so rare; geniuses
are usually quite unpresentable. He was staying with us at Easter, and I
used to borrow him, as one borrows a book and tries to forget to return
it. Where is Sahara? Will you whistle again, please. And his
playing--well, merely sublime. He can even play Wagner on the piano.
Orchestral music on the piano is generally detestable, but Martin--I
used to tell him I believed he had instruments concealed about his
person. He is quite clever enough to. My dear, you can _hear_ the
strings. Then he used to draw me caricatures of all the extremely
tiresome people who were in the house. And his mimicry! Sunningdale
finding fault with the soup, and me telling him he was a gross feeder.
My dear Flint, I could have sworn it was us. You know the charming way
we behave at dinner. Frank Yorkshire, too,--you would have thought that
nobody could have imitated Frank. But Martin--‘Beauty is probably evil
in its origin, which accounts for the extreme plainness of good people!’
Simply too killing. I suppose your low-church brother doesn’t approve of
him, or appreciate him. A slight frigidity occurred when I mentioned
Martin!”
“He certainly doesn’t appreciate all the excellencies you have
mentioned. I doubt if he really knows they exist.”
“That is always the way,” said Lady Sunningdale, with a florid gesture
of despair. “That very rare product, a natural artistic genius, always
makes its wayward appearance in utterly uncongenial places. I am bound
to say it usually leaves them before long; but what a waste of time!
Dear Flints, don’t walk quite so fast. I had no idea this terrace was so
interminable. We shall be miles from the house when we reach the end.
Where are my angels? But it really is a pity. And I suppose his father
will make a curate or a Greek scholar of him.”
“That is just what he is afraid he will not do. He was talking to me
about it last night.”
Lady Sunningdale’s attention suddenly and completely wandered.
“You should build a pergola here, Flints,” she said. “There is a pergola
at Frank Yorkshire’s villa in Capri, which is the most divine thing I
ever saw, covered with roses. We used to dine there, and earwigs dropped
into one’s hair, and from the dark one heard those extraordinary Italian
melodies from the piazza. That is where I should like to live, to leave
the world utterly and entirely and just exist. So unworldly. Yes. My
angels, they want their dinner, and so does their mamma.”
They had got to the end of the terrace, and Lady Sunningdale gazed about
her with roving, abstracted eyes. She never did anything, even gaze,
without her thoughts being occupied with something totally different,
and now as she looked over the great swelling lines of downs which
flowed and melted into each other like interlacing muscles away to the
horizon, across the hollow where the roofs and grey spires of Winchester
trembled in a haze of heat, her thoughts were further away than the
horizon itself.
“So affected of people to pretend not to like food,” she said, “or, if
it is genuine, it shows they are partly imbecile, lacking the sense of
taste. Yes, what Martin wants is to be chucked into an artistic milieu
to see what he is really worth. And the artistic milieu is exactly what
he hasn’t got. He is starving, he is living on himself. Now, no artist
except the very greatest artist can do that, and even then he dies very
quickly. He wants to be soaked and steeped in art. Paris, now! There is
the artistic milieu there; but the music is generally atrocious,--nearly
as bad as in London. He could lunch at the Café Champêtre then.”
“Why do you wish him to do that?” asked Lord Flintshire.
“Dear Flints, because the cooking is so good. The really artist is a
gourmet in everything, including food. Think of the story of Beethoven
and the soup. He threw it in the footman’s face because it was cold. He
could not bear that it should not be hot. Cold soup in one’s face--how
horrible!--and thrown by Beethoven! Even that would not make it
pleasant. Certainly Martin has the instincts of a great artist. He has a
sense of form in all he does, which, I expect, means nothing to your
brother. Certainly also he has the sense of form in himself. My dear, he
is an absolute Adonis, and as slim as asparagus, the English kind.”
Lord Flintshire laughed.
“And when do you expect this paragon?” he asked.
“After lunch. To let Martin go on learning Greek and curacies is like
looking on at somebody being slowly murdered. Pray do as I tell you and
get him away from that terrible parsonage. Why, the word is enough to
upset an artist. It sounds so like parsnips.”
“I feel sure his father would never consent to let him run free in
Paris,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because he has the insular distrust of Paris as a residence for the
young.”
“My dear Flints,” she said, with some impatience, “if a young man is
going to get into messes and make mudpies, he will make them anywhere.
Surely it is the least desirable thing in the world that he should make
them in the parsonage. Yes. You see your brother has so much character
himself that he doesn’t seriously think that anybody else has got any.”
“I wish you would say these things to him,” said Lord Flintshire.
“I will, if I get an opportunity. But if not Paris, London, Rome,
anywhere. Take poor Martin’s collar off, and let him roll in the grass.
Yes, let us turn. Surely it is lunch-time. But do put up a pergola here
all down the terrace and leave out the earwigs. My angels, we are going
to our dinners.”
She turned, her very high heels clicking on the hard gravel of the
terrace, and paused a moment.
“The mistake in principle which your fascinating brother is making,” she
said, “lies in thinking that every one is cast in the same mould, which
is his own, and has to be educated in the same manner. Whereas one of
the few things of which we can be absolutely certain is that everybody
is cast in different moulds. What fools people are really! Fancy trying
to make a scholar or a parson of poor Martin! Such a waste, too, as well
as an impossibility. Sunningdale might as well insist on my taking
lessons in juggling or mathematics. Don’t you hate conjuring-tricks?
What is the point of cutting open a loaf of bread and finding a globe of
gold-fish inside it? Nobody in their senses could call me stupid, but I
am morally incapable of adding up three figures correctly. Why? Simply
because the process bores me, and I therefore do it wrong.”
“That is a fascinating theory of education for the young.”
“It may or may not be fascinating, but it is certainly true. The point
of education is to develop any taste you may possess, not to bore you
with the acquisition of knowledge. Ah, there is Stella Plympton coming
to meet us. She has immense charm, and look at the way her head is set
on her shoulders. Really, to have a neck is the only thing that matters.
A girl with a neck has only to say ‘Good-morning’ for every one to
exclaim, ‘How brilliant!’ Whereas people like me, with no neck, have to
talk from morning till night at the tops of our voices, and wear
ridiculous hats, or else every one says, ‘Poor dear, how much she has
aged, and how very dull and heavy she is.’ Flints, I have immense
trials. I often wonder how I keep up as I do, and am so frequently the
life and soul of the party. Yes. Every one made in the same mould
indeed! Stella and me, for instance. Flints, your brother is an
imbecile. I don’t propose to learn Greek, because he can talk it in his
sleep. Helen, too! Is she to be kept in that dreadful parsonage all her
life, and see nobody but district visitors? I think we ought to take
your brother’s family in hand. He neglects them shamefully; he ought to
be prosecuted for criminal neglect. A man has a duty towards his
children.”
Lord Flintshire laughed.
“And only last night I was telling Sidney that his sense of duty towards
them was too strong.”
Again Lady Sunningdale’s attention rushed headlong away with the bit in
its teeth; it was so rapid that one could not say it wandered.
“The last act of the ‘Götterdämmerung’!” she exclaimed. “My dear, they
gave it superbly the other night; at Covent Garden, too, of all
places,--though the ravens did come in ten bars too soon, and Siegfried
had to throw them away. I never slept for a week afterwards.”
The performance in question, therefore, must have taken place at least a
week ago, for there was no manner of doubt that when Martin arrived, an
hour or so after lunch, Lady Sunningdale was snatching a brief interval
of much-needed repose after her sen’night vigil under the cedar on the
lawn. The rest of the party, with the exception of Stella Plympton, had
dispersed to spend the afternoon in what she considered the violent
English fashion; that is to say, Frank Yorkshire and her brother had
gone to play golf. Lord Flintshire had taken Lady Sunningdale’s daughter
for a ride, and Lord Sunningdale himself, who had an insatiable mania
for losing large sums of money in what he euphemistically called
farming, had gone to feel horses’ legs and poke pigs in the back with
the Scotch bailiff. Martin, in consequence, who had walked over the
fields from the terrible parsonage and approached his uncle’s house from
the garden side, found an idyll of placidity occupying the stage below
the cedar, for a young woman of about his own age was sitting with an
air of extreme content doing nothing whatever, and in a basket-chair
close by was Lady Sunningdale, recuperating after the “Götterdämmerung.”
Martin had formed a somewhat copious subject of conversation during
lunch, and it required no particular exercise of ingenuity on Stella’s
part to guess who the tall, straw-hatted figure was. From him again she
looked at Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers, and glancing back to Martin
raised her eyebrows, as if to ask what had better be done. Then she rose
noiselessly from her chair, and beckoning to him with a little amused,
friendly gesture, walked quietly away from the immediate neighbourhood.
“You must be Mr. Challoner,” she said, holding out her hand; “and Lady
Sunningdale, apparently exhausted by the prospect of your arrival, is
snatching a few moments of repose. What are we to do, then? Shall we
wake her and risk her immediate displeasure, or let her sleep and risk
her ultimate displeasure? We are quite certain to decide wrong.”
Much as Martin liked Lady Sunningdale, his instant and instinctive
decision was not to wake her, for an enforced tête-à-tête with Stella
had its obvious attractions. She was nearly as tall as he, and her
dark-grey eyes almost on a level with his. Her face was a short oval,
slightly and charmingly irregular in feature, the nose a little
tip-tilted, the mouth a little full. This, set on the neck, which,
according to Lady Sunningdale, could supply the place of intellectual
brilliance, made a very good reason for risking the ultimate, not the
immediate displeasure.
“My name is Stella Plympton, by the way,” the girl went on. “Pray excuse
my introducing so stupid a topic. A person’s name matters so very
little, does it not? But sometimes it is inconvenient not to know
uninteresting things, like names, and the hours at which trains leave
stations. Aren’t you thirsty after your walk? Will you not go and forage
for fluids? And what are we to do?”
Martin looked at her with his direct lucid gaze.
“No fluid for me, thanks,” he said. “What do you advise? One can’t go
and say ‘Hi, Lady Sunningdale.’”
Stella laughed.
“I couldn’t,” she said; “but I think you might, if you felt disposed.
She adores you, you know.”
Martin laughed also, flushing slightly.
“I adore her,” he said. “She makes me laugh all the time. And I love
laughing.”
“So do I,” she said. “So please go and say ‘Hi, Lady Sunningdale.’ I’m
sure it would make me laugh. You won’t? Then a false and conventional
code of politeness dictates that I should inflict my company on you,
though you would probably rather be left alone. Anyhow, do not let us
grill here in the sun like beefsteaks. There appears to be chairs in the
shade over there. From there, too, we shall occupy a strategic position
in which to observe Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers.”
There was a slightly sub-acid flavour about this of which Martin was
just conscious. Stella, it seemed, was conscious of it too, for she
explained:
“I feel rather a failure this afternoon,” she said, “for Lady
Sunningdale asked me to stop and amuse her till you came. The result of
my efforts to be entertaining, you can see!”
“Please amuse me instead,” said Martin.
“I daren’t try, for fear you should fall asleep too. How is your sister?
I remember meeting her once. But, though I have never seen you before, I
feel as if I knew you much better. Really at lunch we talked solidly and
exclusively about you. You can do everything, they said, except pass
examinations. That seemed to me very admirable, for it is notorious, as
Lady Sunningdale said, that any fool can pass examinations. She deduced
from that that you can’t be a fool.”
Martin laughed.
“I ought to apologize, then,” said he; “though really it isn’t my fault
that I monopolized the conversation at lunch or that I am left on your
hands now. I hope it wasn’t a long lunch.”
“Ah, but isn’t it the fault of your character that you get talked
about?”
“But not that Lady Sunningdale goes to sleep after lunch. At least I
don’t see how!”
Stella laughed too.
“You put it down to mere lunch?” she said. “But if one were disagreeable
one might suggest that it was the conversation at lunch, not lunch
itself, that led to the desire for repose. How rude of me!”
Martin looked across to the cedar; he was quite willing that Lady
Sunningdale’s need for repose should not yet be satisfied.
“But I thought you settled that it was your efforts to amuse her that
produced that result,” he said.
The sound of Stella’s laughter perhaps roused Lady Sunningdale, for she
moved in her chair and suddenly sat bolt upright.
“Ah, she is awake,” said Stella. “We can peashoot each other no longer.
What a pity!”
“But that at least is very polite of you,” said Martin, rising.
“And that is very modest,” she answered. “It might have been true.”
Shrill, staccato cries came from the cedar as the two walked back across
the hot velvet of the lawn.
“Stella dear, it is too bad of you,” shrieked Lady Sunningdale. “I send
for my own particular young man and you monopolize him all the
afternoon. Martin, you perfidious monster. What do you mean by flirting
with Stella under my very eyes? Did I close them a moment? I think I
must have. Is it not tea-time? Where is Sahara? There is a terrible
black dog of Flints’s. My dear, it is too hot for words, and have you
walked all the way from the terrible parsonage to see me? That is too
sweet of you. What have you and Stella been talking about? Stella
dearest, if you would whistle three or four times for Sahara. Martin,
Frank Yorkshire is here. So odd, two counties in the same house in
another county. Is not geography detestable? Yes. I sat next your father
last night. I don’t think I ever saw anybody so unlike as you two. I
don’t think that’s grammar. Stella, you went fast asleep, I thought, in
that chair, and when I woke up, I found it was me in the other. Where
_are_ the dogs? Martin, the ‘Götterdämmerung,’ was too exquisite!
Ternina! Floods, I assure you--I wept floods, and at the critical moment
I tugged at my necklace, and it broke, and a large pearl fell into the
trombone below. Why did you not come up to town, as I told you, for it?
Not the pearl,--do not be so foolish.”
Her slumber had slightly dishevelled Lady Sunningdale, and as she poured
forth this surprising nonsense she effected various small repairs and
generally made the crooked straight. Sahara, the delinquent dachshund,
recalled by shrill whistling from Stella, waddled pathetically up to
her, and a violent wagging of heliotrope in a flower-bed near probably
indicated the locality of Suez Canal.
“And we are going to send you to London or Paris or Rome, Martin,” she
continued. “And we don’t quite know which. Tell me, is your father
naturally solemn, or is his solemnity beautifully assumed. I don’t think
any one could really be as solemn as he appears to be. He sat next me at
dinner last night and was quite fascinating. I shall have seven
candlesticks on my dressing-table for the future, and he extremely
reserved. Dear me, I suppose it would have been better not to have said
that. But really his attitude about you is ridiculous. Do imitate him. I
am sure you can.”
The corners of Martin’s mouth quivered slightly.
“I think I won’t,” he said.
“You mean you can.”
“I think, perhaps, I could,” said Martin, guardedly.
“Ah, do. Imitate our conversation last night about matters of high-and
low-church. Wasn’t it dreadful? I mixed them up, and I don’t know which
is which now. Why will Suez Canal always leap about in garden-beds when
there is the whole lawn? Naughty! Martin, we have been talking a great
deal about you. I am rather bored with you. I stop here over Sunday, and
I shall go to church if your father preaches. I think that will give me
more influence with him. He said he would very likely come over to tea
to-day. I shall never forgive him if he does not, because I want to talk
to him about you. We are not going to let you blush unseen any more, and
waste your sweetness on the parsonage air. You’ve got to go and work.
Men must work, though I never saw the slightest need for women to weep.
I haven’t wept for years, except the other night at the
‘Götterdämmerung.’ What a charming picture of domestic life, Martin
reading Greek history at the table and Mrs. Martin sobbing violently in
the corner! Yes. How I run on! I suppose you really ought to go to
Germany and eat cherry jam with your chicken.”
“How horrible!” said Stella. “Must one take it?”
“If you want to enter into the essential Teutonic spirit you must. You
might as well hope to feel like an Anglo-Saxon without being always in a
rage or playing violent games as try to be German without jam. How I
hate women who play games! They are nearly as odious as men who don’t.
Let us go indoors, and Martin shall play to us till tea-time. Afterwards
he shall play till dinner-time.”
Lady Sunningdale surged slowly to her feet and looked helplessly about.
“Where are the dogs?” she said. “It is too tiresome. They are sure to
stray into the woods, and Flints’s horrid pheasants will peck them. My
darlings! Ah, there they are amid what was once begonias. It looks more
like a battlefield now. How naughty! Come at once, all of you!”
There was no doubt whatever that Martin’s piano-playing was of a very
remarkable order, and before he was half-way through Chopin’s first
_ballade_, Stella, who had been accustomed to consider the piano as an
instrument for the encouragement of conversation after dinner, or at the
most as the introduction to the vocal part of a concert, found herself
sitting bolt upright in her chair with a strange tingling excitement
spreading through her and a heightened and quickened beating of the
blood. She was essentially unmusical; but something in this was
extraordinarily arresting; her nerves, if not her sense of melody, were
at attention. As for Lady Sunningdale, she always gasped when Martin
played, and did so now.
“Too heavenly,” she said at the end. “Now make me miserable. Play the
rain on the roof. Tum, tum, tum, tum, don’t you know. Yes, how clever of
you to guess.”
It was rather clever, for Lady Sunningdale’s rendering did not really
resemble any one tune in the world more than any other.
Martin paused a moment. Then the slow, sullen drip of hot, steady rain
on the roof began, as it sounded to a man who was alone in an alien
land. It fell with hopeless regular iteration from grey skies, then
there was the gurgle of some choked gutter, and the collected water
overflowed and was spilt with a little chuckle. Very distantly on the
horizon remote lightning winked and flickered, but there was as yet no
sound of thunder in the dark sultriness of the afternoon, but only the
endless, monotonous rhythm of the dropping rain. Then, faintly at first
but with slow crescendo, there was heard the distant drums of thunder,
buffeting and rumbling among the hills. Then all at once the rain grew
heavier; larger drops, as if of lead, fell beating with a resonant
insistance on the roof, and the voice of the storm grew angry and
articulate. Suddenly with an appalling crash it burst immediately
overhead, drowning for a moment the beat of the rain, and by the blaze
of the simultaneous flash sea, sky, and the wave-beaten rocks of Majorca
leapt into light. Then, as thunder will, it drew away, and for a time
the rain was not so heavy, but again the storm swept up, and once more
the chariots of God crashed on their way above them, and the wild
lantern of the storm flared this way and that, and once more again after
that stupendous riot in the skies the hot darkness was punctuated by the
dreadful melancholy of the dripping rain. Then the storm growled itself
away into the distance; a little light came back into the weeping skies;
the pulse of the rain grew fainter, and again a choked gutter gurgled
and overflowed. Suddenly, through some unconjectured rift in the clouds,
one beam of the sun, divinely clear, shot down for a moment on them with
excellent brightness. Yet it was only for a moment; again the clouds
drifted up, and the rain, which for that minute had ceased, began again,
dripping with hopeless regular iteration on to the roof as evening
closed in, some evening far away in a land of exile beneath an alien
sky.
Effusive as she usually was, and accustomed to fill any interval of
silence that might conceivably occur with discursive volubility, even
Lady Sunningdale was silent except for an “Oh, Martin,” which she no
more than whispered. For there was that in the room which, in spite of
her superficial frivolity and the dragon-fly dartings of her mind, she
knew and recognized and adored, that the touch of art which makes even
of things that are common and unclean gems and jewels. Stella too said
nothing, but sat still, much more upright than her lolling wont, holding
the arms of her chair. From where she sat she could see Martin’s profile
cut with great clearness of outline against a brocaded screen of scarlet
and gold that stood beyond the piano, and between the music and the
musician she was dumb. Even in the desultory accidental conversation
which she had had with him during the slumbers of Lady Sunningdale there
had been something arresting to her in his brilliant boyish personality,
and now from his finger-tips there flowed out, so it seemed to her, a
personality just as brilliant, but either very mature or by the instinct
of genius still boyish, but clad, as it were, in the purple of the
artistic nature. There was nothing amateurish about it; and, unmusical
as she was, she could not help recognising the certainty of the
performance.
For a few moments after the last note had died into silence he sat
silent also, with head bent over the keys. Then he looked up.
“Is that enough, Lady Sunningdale?” he asked.
“No, you angel from heaven, it is never enough!” she cried; “but play
something different--something brilliant; I should expire with several
hollow church-yard groans if you played that again. It makes me
miserable. Play something _virtuoso_, and let me come closer, where I
can see your hands.”
She moved to a low chair to the right of the piano.
“Brahms’s ‘Paganini Variations,’” he suggested.
“Ah, yes, do. It makes me shriek with laughter.”
Then, with the same absolute facility and certainty, with the same
cleanness and perfection, suggesting, indeed, a slim poised figure, he
took a header into that ridiculous theme. But out of the foam and
bubble beneath his hands flowers grew, stars were scattered, and all
nature went mad with dancing. But when the riot of jubilance was at its
height, a tall, severe figure suddenly appeared at the French window of
the drawing-room, advanced very audibly on the bare boards, and spoke
sufficiently loud to be heard.
“Ah, Lady Sunningdale,” said Mr. Challoner, “how are you? And Martin
wasting his time at the piano, as usual. How kind of you to let him play
to you!”
Martin wasted no more time there; at the noise of interruption, before
his brain had conjectured who it was, his hands stopped, the eager,
active vitality died out of his face, as when a candle is blown out, and
he banged a random chord in sheer rage. Then, instantaneously, he
recognized the voice, and he rose quickly from the music-stool,
trembling.
“Yes, wasting my time, as usual,” he said, excitedly, the artist in him
suddenly struck dead, leaving just an angry, startled boy. “I must go
home, Lady Sunningdale. Thank you so much for letting me play to you,
and I hope I haven’t bored you. Good-bye. I have a lot of work to do.”
He closed the piano lid as he spoke, but it slipped from his fingers and
shut with a bang that set all the strings jarring.
“Ah, how could you interrupt like that?” cried Lady Sunningdale to his
father. “Yes, how are you, Mr. Challoner? Martin, pray begin it again.
We will all sit quite quiet without stirring a finger or breathing. You
are superb!”
His father sat down, distressed at Martin’s rudeness, but honestly
desirous of being sympathetic.
“Dear boy, I am so sorry,” he said. “Pray, play your piece.”
“I can’t,” said Martin. “I don’t know it.”
For a moment father and son looked at each other, the one with surprise
and indignation, the other in impetuous rebellion and anger.
“Lady Sunningdale asks you to play again what you were playing,” said
his father, the desire to be sympathetic vanishing, the sternness
deserved by this deplorable lack of manners in Martin increasing every
moment.
“It is quite impossible that I should play it,” said Martin. “I couldn’t
play a note of it.”
“You seemed to me to know it,” said Mr. Challoner. “Surely you have
played it a hundred times at home.”
Martin was really incapable in the shock of this transition from the
world which he loved and in which he was at home to this other world of
decent behaviour.
“More like a thousand times,” he said and simply, and directly left the
room.
There was a somewhat awkward pause. Mr. Challoner was seriously angry
with his ill-behaved son; Lady Sunningdale was disgusted at being
deprived of her music, and Stella, with a natural eye for drama, was
immensely interested. It seemed to her there might be a good deal of
drama behind this little incident. Then, luckily perhaps, Lady
Sunningdale remembered that she was, so to speak on a mission to the
dark ignorance of Mr. Challoner, that savage in matters of art, on
behalf of Martin, and she put her disgust in her pocket.
“It was charming of you to have come over to see me,” she said to him,
with her easy-natured charm. “Yes, I suppose Martin wastes a terrible
lot of time at the piano when he should be doing Greek history.
Demosthenes! How fascinating! Stella dearest, do see what Suez Canal is
doing, and slap him. And will you tell us when tea is ready? Do you
know, Mr. Challoner, Martin plays remarkably,--really remarkably?”
Stella, as she was wont to do, strolled out through the window by which
catastrophe had entered, leaving the two others alone.
“Yes, it is that incessant waste of time that distresses me,” said Mr.
Challoner. “But the piano at the parsonage is so old that he hardly
cares to play on it. But, first, I must apologise to you, Lady
Sunningdale, for the extremely rude way in which Martin behaved to you.
I promise you he shall make his apologies in person.”
For a moment her irritation mastered her.
“He apologise?” she cried. “It ought to be you. Dear Mr. Challoner, how
rude I am! Pray forgive me. But you don’t know, you can’t know, what
music is to Martin. You don’t know what divine, glorious mood in him you
shattered. It was like throwing a brick at an iridescent soap-bubble. I
suppose Brahms is a name to you like Smith or Jones.”
Then she recalled diplomacy again.
“So difficult to understand Brahms, is it not?” she said. “That is the
fascination of it. But I assure you it is worth thinking over. Martin is
wonderful. He has improved so enormously, too. He is not second-rate or
third-rate, but first-rate. What have you been doing to him?”
“You mean at playing the piano?” asked Mr. Challoner, as if he had said
“sweeping a crossing.”
Lady Sunningdale longed for Sahara to bite him.
“Yes, at playing the piano,” she said, swallowing her irritation again.
“He ought to study, you know. He is wasting his time, that is quite
true, but not at the piano. I am dreadfully impertinent, am I not? But
Flints is an old friend and Martin is his nephew, and music is music, so
I feel it very strongly. Of course it is only natural that you, Mr.
Challoner, with your earnest nature and your serious aims and all
that,--you were too interesting last night, I lay awake for hours
thinking over what you had said,--should consider poor Martin very
frivolous, but he is an artist to his finger-tips. It is his nature. Mon
Dieu! what finger-tips, too! You know he was playing, and playing, I
assure you, with consummate ease when you interrup--when you came in, a
thing that really great pianists require to practice for months!”
“You are too kind to take such an interest in my lazy son,” said Mr.
Challoner, still very stiffly,--so stiffly, in fact, that Lady
Sunningdale looked hastily at the fireplace, thinking he must have
swallowed the tongs.
“I assure you it is not kindness that prompts me at all,” she said. “It
is mere justice and mere economy. I am very economical. Ask Sunningdale.
The world cannot afford to lose a talent like that. If he is like that
when he is practically uneducated, to what may not he grow? Heaven
knows, the world is so very stupid that we should hoard and save every
grain of talent that exists. It is like what you so beautifully said to
me last night about the ten talents in a napkin.”
“Surely not,” said Mr. Challoner, a faint smile breaking his gravity.
“Well, the one talent, then. I have no head for numbers. And poor
Martin’s talent seems to me to be put in a very damp napkin, except now
and then when somebody like me lifts up a corner of it and lets the
sparkle of gold appear.”
It happened very rarely that Lady Sunningdale was stirred into such
coherence and earnestness. As a rule, her multifarious little interests
were like children playing “King of the Castle,” rapidly pulling each
other down from their momentary pre-eminence, first one and then another
perching precariously on the summit. But certainly the most long-lived
“King” there was music, and Martin’s future, with the rain-storm of
Chopin and the mad frolic of Brahms still in her ears, was very securely
throned.
“Think me impertinent, my dear Mr. Challoner,” she went on. “Think me
what you will, only do give your most serious attention to what I say.
Martin devoting his fingers, his brain, the power of his extraordinary
artistic nature to ancient history is a thing to make Julius Cæsar weep.
The pity of it when he might be starting us all on a new chapter in
music! Really I believe that to be possible. And really I am in earnest;
and when, as I hope, you know me better, and see how completely
scatter-brained I usually am, you will appreciate how deeply I feel
this.”
“You mean that my son should devote the most useful, the most active
years of his life to playing the piano?” he asked.
“Playing the piano?” she cried, feeling it was almost hopeless to try to
make him understand. “That is, of course, a thread in the golden garment
of music; but to take piano-playing as synonymous with music would be
the same as calling the baptism of those of riper years the same thing
as Christianity. Music--music, that must be his life. Flints told me
this morning that you found him slack, lazy. So would you be if you had
to learn scales, just as he may be--I am sure he is--at classical
studies.”
“What do you propose, then?” he asked, inwardly rather rebelling at the
consideration he felt somehow forced to give to her eagerness. For, in
spite of her discursiveness, it was clearly impossible not to recognise
the surprising quickness and intuition of her mental processes.
“Why, just what I have been telling you. First let him throw his
dictionaries and histories into the fire.”
“I have an immense, a vital belief in the educating power of the
classics,” said Mr. Challoner.
“For everybody? You cannot mean it! Can you tell from looking at a
picture if the artist knew Latin? Or pick me a piece of Greek out of
‘Tristan und Isolde.’ In any case, Martin has spent some ten years at
them, he tells me, and what is the result? He fails to pass his
examinations. Whether they are a criterion of education, or whether they
are an instrument, he or they have failed. He is second-rate at that,
third-rate,--it is all one. There is first-rate, and--the rest of the
world. What is the good of turning another second-rate person into the
sheepfold of the second-rate, particularly when on other lines that
person has all the appearance, anyhow, of being first-rate? Well, that
is what I think. How kind of you to let me talk so. Where are my angels?
Is it not tea-time?”
Lady Sunningdale’s unparalleled effort in concentration of thought here
broke completely down, and a whole tribe of clamouring competitors
invaded the castle of her mind, dethroning the “King.”
“Yes, Martin really was playing too divinely,” was the “King’s” expiring
cry. “So like a great artist, too, to bang down the piano lid when he
was interrupted. Beethoven did it too, you know, and shouted, ‘I play no
more to such swine.’ So delicious of him. And Helen, how is she? You
must bring her over. Frank Yorkshire is dying, if not dead, to see her.
He is one of those people, you know, who does nothing and appreciates so
much. So infinitely better than doing a great deal rather badly, and not
recognizing the first-rate when you see it. And are you going to preach
on Sunday? I should have been so happy if I had been a man, to have
lived in a country-place like this and just spend my days in doing a
little good among these simple people. How beautiful it must be! I abhor
London,--so shallow. Yes. You really must preach on Sunday, Mr.
Challoner; otherwise I shall stay at home and read improper novels. You
would not like to have that on your conscience, would you? People are
growing terribly slack about Sunday, are they not? Yes, shall we try to
find some tea? Talking makes one so hungry.”