Mr. Challoner was seated at the very orderly table in his study, on
which, neatly corrected, revised, and arranged, were the sheets of his
sermon for the next Sunday. In front of him, with his face towards the
window, stood Martin. Neither father nor son wore a very pleasant
expression: Martin looked like some timid wild animal, at bay in a
corner, frightened into a sort of desperation, while his father’s thick,
bushy eyebrows were contracted into a very heavy frown and his mouth was
tightly compressed, as if he were holding back with difficulty some
impulse of anger that nearly mastered him.
“I was ashamed of you,” he said; “I was ashamed that a son of mine could
behave with such abominable rudeness to Lady Sunningdale and me. A few
years ago, when such behaviour would have been more excusable, because
you were younger, I should have given you a whipping!”
“I am sure you would,” said Martin.
Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler.
“Martin, I wish you to understand once and for all,” he said, “that I
will be treated by you both in public and in private with ordinary
respect and courtesy.”
“I have already told you I was sorry I was rude to you,” said Martin,
speaking very quickly and incisively, with an odd little tremor of angry
fright in his voice.
“You have often told me you were sorry lately,” said his father, “and
almost before the words were out of your mouth I have had occasion to
find fault with you for something else.”
Martin gave a short, mirthless laugh.
“That is quite true,” he said; “I can’t do right, it appears.”
Mr. Challoner paused a moment; Martin had never before come to open
words with him like this.
“What do you mean by speaking to me like that?” he asked, in a voice
scarcely audible.
There was no answer.
“I have asked you a question, Martin,” he said, his voice rising
suddenly.
Martin pushed back his hair with a hopeless gesture.
“What answer do you expect me to give?” he asked, impatiently. “There is
no answer to such a question. You get angry with me and you frighten me.
I think you do it on purpose. You have frightened me into silence all my
life, now you have frightened me at last into answering you. I hate
anger; it makes me sick. And you have been angry with me every day since
I came home for my holidays.”
He sat down on a chair behind him with a sort of dull, indifferent
acquiescence in whatever might happen, his face sullen, frightened,
joyless. It seemed as if it could scarcely be the same radiant boy who
had played Brahms an hour ago.
There was a pause, and all the imprisoned longing for love in the father
beat dismally at its bars, for he felt, and felt truly, that just now
Martin almost hated him. It seemed terribly hard that his own daily and
constant desire that Martin should grow up a useful God-fearing man,
industrious and earnest, should be the bar that separated them, yet so
he knew it to be. Had he been a weak, indulgent father, one who had not
implanted in him the unbending, ineradicable sense of his duty towards
the son whom God had given him, how sweet might have been the human
relations between them. His love for his son was the very reason why he
corrected him,--that and the duty attached to his own fatherhood; and
when he saw him slack, lazy, or as now wanting in courtesy and respect,
it was still from sheer duty that his anger sprang. And now for the
first time from Martin’s own lips he heard the effect. He frightened
him, on purpose, so it appeared. Was this, then, one of the hopeless,
incomprehensible puzzles that God seems sometimes to set his groping
children, this fight between duty and love, in which one must lose, and
be vanquished. It seemed to him cruelly hard if this was so.
Martin felt his mouth go suddenly dry as he spoke, but he was past
really caring what might happen. His father, he knew, was about as angry
with him as he could be, and he himself hated and feared his anger in
the instinctive unreasoning way in which a grown man will fear something
which can really hurt him no longer, but which he feared in childhood.
That vibrating note was in his father’s voice which he associated with
early failures of his own in Latin declensions, and the hint of what
would have happened to him if he had been younger also carried him back
to early, dreadful scenes. But finding his father did not reply, he
looked up at him, and saw that the anger in his face had been
extinguished like a wind-blown lamp. But all tenderness, all sense of
being intimate with him was so alien to Martin that he did not trouble
to guess what emotion had taken the place of anger. Anger, however, was
gone, taking his own fear with it, and with a certain mercilessness
characteristic of youth, he deliberately, so to speak, hit back.
“Whatever I do, you find fault with,” he said. “I try to please you, it
is no use. Would it not be better if I went away? There is no good in my
stopping here; I don’t suppose this sort of thing gives you any
pleasure. Uncle Rupert, I am sure, would let me go and stay with him in
London next week till the Long Term begins at Cambridge. That will be in
another fortnight. You told me you wished me to be up there all the
time. So would it not be much better if I went away?”
His father did not reply at once, but sat fingering his writing things
with rather tremulous hands.
“Are you not happy at home?” he asked at length.
“No,” said Martin, shortly.
The brevity and certainty of this struck more deeply yet. If Martin a
few months before had felt sick at his father’s anger, the latter was
certainly the more to be pitied now.
“Martin, what is the matter between us?” he said.
“I don’t know; but it’s the same as it has always been, only it’s rather
worse. I can’t please you, I suppose, and you are always down on me for
something. It is to be hoped it is doing some good, because otherwise it
seems,--well, rather unnecessarily unpleasant. First it was my work,
then what I said to Helen, then ‘The Mill on the Floss,’ and now this.
To-morrow it will be something else. There is sure to be something. I
daresay I don’t understand you, and I know you don’t understand me.
This afternoon, for instance. Oh, it’s no use trying to explain,” he
said.
“It may be the utmost use. It may make the greatest difference. I only
wish that you had said to me years ago what you are saying now. I have
tried to be a good father to you, but sometimes, often, I have been
puzzled as to what to do. You don’t confide in me, you don’t tell me
your joys and pleasures, and let me share them. I often hear you
laughing when I am not with you. But when I am, not so often.”
Martin half shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “There we are again.”
“That is quite true,” he said. “But what can I do when music, which to
me is the greatest joy and pleasure in life, seems to you just a waste
of time. You have often told me so. You don’t know one bit what it means
to me; and as it seems to you a waste of time, how can I confide in you
about a thing you don’t really approve of and of which, you will pardon
me, you are absolutely ignorant? In the middle of the Brahms, or
whatever it was, you come in and interrupt by saying that I am wasting
my time, as usual. I might as well come in in the middle of prayers and
say you were wasting--there I go again. I am sorry. That will show you
how hopeless it all is.”
Mr. Challoner was silent a moment, really too much pained to speak. But
he was wise enough to recognise that to say anything just then would be
to effectually stop the only confidence that Martin had reposed in him
for years.
“Well, Martin,” he said, after a moment.
“Ah, it’s no use,” he said. “Even at the very instant when I am
consciously trying to be careful, I say something like that, and you
are shocked at it. But I meant it: it exactly expressed what I meant.
Music is to me like that. You never thought that possible. All these
years you have been thinking that I was very fond of music--just
that--and wasted a great deal of time at the piano. Whereas it seems to
me that I am wasting time when I am reading ‘Thucydides.’”
“That is what Lady Sunningdale said. She talked to me about it after you
went away. You know her well, do you not?”
“Yes; she has been tremendously kind to me.”
His father rose.
“You must go now, dear lad,” he said. “I have got some work to do before
to-morrow. And let us try, both of us, to find more of a friend in each
other. I shall never have another son, and you will never have another
father. It would be very sad, would it not, if we did not, each of us,
make the best of that relation?”
There came into his beautiful brown eyes the shadow of tears, and Martin
wondered.
“I will try, father,” he said.
Mr. Challoner did not at once begin the work which he wished to finish
before bedtime when Martin left him, but sat with his head resting on
his hand, thinking very deeply. He was much troubled and perplexed, and
his future line of action, usually so clear to him, so precisely
indicated by his sense of duty, and, to do him justice, so undeviatingly
followed, was now very misty and ill defined. Hitherto he had never
entertained any serious doubts that he was not doing the best possible
for Martin, both in always correcting and admonishing when he seemed to
be idle, even in trifles where some small carelessness on his part
indicated the danger of his falling into slack or slovenly habits, and
in his convictions that school and college education in classical
subjects was the best possible method of training and developing his
mind. He did not in the least even now, with regard to the latter, think
it certain that he was mistaken, but it had been brought home to him
very clearly in the last twenty-four hours that other people thought he
was. For his brother’s opinion he always felt a considerable respect,
but for Lady Sunningdale’s, though he wondered at it, he could not help
feeling more. A dozen times yesterday at dinner, a dozen times more this
afternoon, he had asked himself how the observations of a woman who
really appeared to be scarcely capable of consecutive orderly thought
could be worth consideration, but as often some plump grain of solid
sense, showing acuteness and perception amid the husks and chaff,
answered the question. He himself was conscious of not being quite at
his ease with her, but he could not help admiring her intense vitality,
her speed, her busy, acute inquisitiveness. And it was she who hailed
Martin, poor, desultory, idle Martin, as a genius.
Suppose he took their advice and let his son go free into that world of
which he himself knew so little, of which, however, he had so abundant a
mistrust, how dangerous and hazardous an experiment! Martin, with his
slackness, his ineradicable tendency to what was easy and pleasant;
Martin, above all, with this apparently so great musical gift,
unsuspected by his father, but adored by others, was exactly the sort of
boy to be petted, spoiled, ruined by the careless, highly-coloured
butterflies which Mr. Challoner believed to dance there all day in the
sun. To them music, painting, drama, the visible arts, were ends in
themselves, the object being enjoyment, while to him such a doctrine
savoured almost of profanity. To him painting, sculpture, music, were
recreations which might at intervals be innocently allowed to the
earnest worker, but even in such times of refreshment the Christian
would look for something more, and find in beauty that which should lead
his thoughts to the Fountain and Creator of it. Such, however, was not
the view, as he was aware, of the world of Art into which he was invited
to let Martin plunge; to them music was sweet sound and led the soul
nowhere but to music; painting was line and colour; sculpture was form,
and the end and fulfilment and consummation of it was perfection of form
and the appreciation thereof. About this latter branch of art he had
never been able to come to a definite conclusion. Certainly studies in
the nude seemed to him to be things dangerous, if not inherently
sensual.
“All Art is perfectly useless.” He remembered having read that sentence
in some book of Martin’s which he had found lying about. A rapid glance
at it on that occasion had justified its confiscation and a few words to
Martin on the subject. But that sentence occurred to him again now, for
there in half a line was expressed tritely and unmistakeably the exact
opposite of what he held to be the truth. All Art, he would have said
himself, that does not--apart from the natural and innocent enjoyment of
it--raise and elevate the soul, is not art at all. As a corollary, the
highest form of painting in his eyes was religious painting, because it
led by a direct road to its goal, the highest form of music, religious
music. These two were wholly laudable; Raphael, so to speak, shook
hands with missionaries, and Handel took Luther’s arm. But at the other
end of the line of artists came those who, however consummate was their
art, treated of themes which in themselves were dangerous, or, worst of
all, who by clothing sin in melodious and beautiful garb rendered it,
even if not attractive, at any rate more venial. He himself, as has been
seen, was not musical; but when a few weeks ago he had found himself in
London with Martin, and with the eminently laudable desire of getting
more into sympathy with his son, had taken him to see “Tannhäuser” at
the opera, the evening had not been wholly a success, for the curtain
had not risen ten minutes on Venusberg before his incredulous horror had
deepened into certainty, and he had got swiftly up and peremptorily
ordered Martin to leave also. And Wagner was hustled by him into the
outer darkness to gnash teeth in company with Zola, George Eliot, and
Titian.
Here, then, is stated in brief, so that the real and soul-searching
difficulty in his course of action with regard to Martin’s future may be
better understood, the attitude of Mr. Challoner towards Art. With the
whole force of his strenuous, upright soul he believed that one thing in
the world alone mattered, and that art, science, knowledge were at the
best but by-paths that led on to the great high-road of the Gospel. In
that they contained many things of beauty the worker was allowed to
wander in their coolnesses at times for the refreshment of his
weariness, but all the beauty he found there was but the sign-post
pointing him back to the high-road. Other by-paths were there also,
beautiful as these, if one looked on the outward form only, but
instinct with danger, and of an evil glitter. Such led through tangled
gardens of vivid meretricious gaudiness, but if one stooped to pluck
those poisonous flowers, they were vitriol to the fingers, and the
unnameable beasts of darkness, coiled among the leaves, alert and ready
to spring, would fasten on the hand.
Martin had left his father’s presence that evening with an idea that was
really quite new to him. The truism, in fact, that a father loved his
son had suddenly emerged from those dull ranks and taken its place in
the far more notable array of truths. For the interview which had begun
in a manner so dismally familiar to him, except that in this case it was
set one or two octaves higher than usual, had ended in a manner
unexpected and unprecedented. Never before had he known, though he had
vaguely taken it for granted, that his father really cared for intimacy
and love in his relations with himself. At any rate he had never seen
the fact bare and exposed, for whenever it had shewn itself it had
always been wrapped up, so to speak, in the memory of some rebuke. But
to-night it had flashed on him; he had seen through these coverings, and
a heart of gold shone and beat within. And with the natural instinctive
generosity of youth he himself was quick to respond; and though his
habitual reserve and shyness with his father could not at once be
dispersed, so as to allow him any effusive rejoinder, his response had
been very genuine, and his resolve, as he left the study, to explore and
develop the reef which had suddenly gleamed in what, to be frank, he had
considered hard unyielding rock, very vivid. With this in his head,
ready to be matured by the unconscious processes of sleep, during which
the mind, though the senses lie dormant, goes on delving in its
difficulties and groping for light, he went up to bed.
As he undressed, his mind flashed quickly backward and forward through
the events of the day; for a moment a smile uncurled his lips as he
thought of some extravagance or incoherence of Lady Sunningdale’s, the
next his mouth was pursed again into a low whistle of some half-dozen
bars of a tune that ran in his head. That Brahms,--to which had come so
fruitful an interruption,--what a delicious piece of boisterous
irresponsibility! It had infected Stella Plympton, too; he had known
that from a glance at her wide eyes and half-opened mouth when he began.
Then suddenly, just before the interruption came, she had given one
heavenly ripple of unconscious laughter at some surprising piece of
_virtuosité_. Yes, she understood, understood probably better than Lady
Sunningdale, who always gasped. The gasp, it is true, was a great
compliment to his nimble fingers, but it should be as impossible to
think of fingers or nimbleness, when that was going on, as to think
about the chemical constituents of water when one is satisfying a noble
thirst. Then came that dreadful scene in the study, with its utterly
unexpected end. Well, he would try, anyhow.
The moon was shining outside against the blind with an amazing white
brilliance, and as he undressed he went across to the open window and
let the flood of cool light shine in. It made the yellow flame of his
bedroom candle look insufferably vulgar and tawdry, and blowing it out
he again crossed to the window and sat there while the stirring of some
fragrant breeze sent its soft ripples against his skin. As Lady
Sunningdale had said, he was a gourmet in sensations, and the
exquisiteness of the sleeping summer night, peopled with ivory lights
and ebony shadows, and the great velvet vault of the sky pricked by the
thin, remote fires of innumerable stars and lit by that glorious sexless
flame of the moon smote him with a sudden pang of pleasure. Somehow all
this must be translatable into music, the stars scattered over the sky
were likely staccato notes of strings across the great tune of the
moonshine; it was the first slow movement in the great symphony of night
and day. At sunrise the scherzo would laugh and dance down the breeze of
morning with a thousand quivering leaves and a million nodding flowers,
trees waving, birds among the branches. Noonday would combine all the
powers of light and air into a third movement of intolerable
splendour....
He got up from where he sat, and stretched his arms wide, as if to
embrace it all. Then half-laughing at himself, he dived into his
nightshirt, leaving the rest of his clothes in a heap on the floor, and,
as his custom always was, laid his face on his hand and fell asleep.
It was still early when he woke, but the sun was up, and even as he had
anticipated before he went to sleep, the slow movement of the moon had
given place to a dancing, rapturous scherzo. A breeze stirred with a
short sweeping rhythm among the trees, birds chirped in the leafy
temples, and the sparkle of the early sunlight gave an inimitable
briskness to the young day. Then with a sudden ebb in the full tide of
his joy of life came the thought that it was Sunday, a day in that house
neither of rest or gladness in his view, but one much taken up with
lengthy unmusical services, in which there was a great deal of singing,
with intervals in which no amusement could be indulged in.
He walked from his window back to his bed and looked at his watch. It
was still not yet seven, but the “land of counterpane” was no longer
desirable or even possible, and putting on coat and trousers he went
quietly downstairs and out across the lawn into the fields beyond, where
a bathing-place had been scooped out of the river-bed. Till breakfast,
at any rate,--still two hours away,--he need put no restraint on the
flood of vitality and joy that ran this morning in spate through him and
this beautiful world. There were two hours of it, with the cool shock of
the racing water, the caress of the warm wind, the sense of being alone,
and young, and out-of-doors. Pagan it might be, but irresistibly
delightful.
Then suddenly, while still thrilling with these joys, the mellow tones
of the church-bell struck across the staccato sounds of life, and all at
once the scene with his father the evening before and his own resolve to
try to please him flashed into his mind. The bell, he knew, must be for
the early celebration in the parish-church, and he had still twenty
minutes, enough, if he was quick, in which to dress in the prescribed
Sunday garb (though why black was suitable to Sunday he had long given
up trying to guess, leaving it to rot away among the unconjecturable
riddles of life), and, a thing which pleased his father so intensely,
play the hymn on the melancholy one-manualled organ, the curious
quavering tones of which formed so remarkable a contrast to the nasal
notes of village voices. So with something of a sigh for his
renunciation of the river-bank, he hurried back home, and before the
bell had ceased ringing passed through the church-yard where yew-trees
of noble growth looked down upon the horrors of the modern stone-mason
with his “chaste” designs and “handsome” crosses into the grey, cool
church.
To judge by the interior it is probable that the mouth which Lady
Sunningdale so much admired in the vicar and the Bishop of Tavistock was
a low-church mouth, for Mr. Challoner at any rate did not attempt to
make any appeal to the souls of his parishioners by means of the senses.
Two brass flower-vases, of that curiously feeble design that somehow
suggests at once low-church ecclesiasticism, stood on the altar, over
which a flood of mauve and magenta light poured in through misshapen
figures of apostles and prophets in the east window. In one transept
stood the organ to which Martin directed his steps, the pipes of which,
framed in a wooden border ornamented with fretsaw work, were painted
white with a scroll of red pattern in line embellishing their top ends.
Behind the organ-bench was a red plush curtain with golden fleurs-de-lys
stamped on it, to screen the person of the organist from the eyes of the
congregation. The seats for the people, who were thinly scattered over
the church, were faced eastwards, and were made of shiny, varnished
pitch-pine, while the floor of the aisles and accesses was tiled with a
cheerful ecclesiastical pattern in violent blue and Indian red, and
pierced here and there with gratings of cast-iron work through which, in
winter, came the hot, stale blasts from the warming apparatus. A black
iron stove stood near the font at the west end of the church, and rows
of somewhat dilapidated rush-bottomed chairs denoted the place allotted
to the school-children.
To Martin, who for the last two months had been accustomed to the grey
dimness and carved spaciousness of King’s Chapel, the first sight of
these staring crudenesses came with a shock of almost physical
repulsion. Why had it been done? What did it all mean? What emotions
were the ill-coloured, badly designed windows intended to arouse or what
was the affinity between pitch-pine and worship? Impressionable and
impatient as he always was, he nearly turned back after he had opened
the door and was confronted by this half-forgotten tawdry brilliance.
Then the motive which had made him forsake the cool riverside, the
desire to please his father, prevailed.
The organ was blown by a small boy with a highly polished face, who
stood directly by the player’s left-hand, and, since the bellows were
not powerful enough to supply the lungs of the organ, unless plied by an
energetic arm, was often blown too, and breathed heavily into the
organist’s ear. It was still a few minutes to eight when Martin came in,
and found the village school-master preparing to begin that series of
somewhat elementary harmonies to which is given the vague title of a
“voluntary.” But he slid quickly off the seat with a smile of welcome to
the other, and in a searching whisper told him what the hymns were going
to be, and what “Kyrie” would be sung between the commandments. This
later information was given with a self-depreciatory blush, for Mr.
Milton was not at all mute and inglorious, but composed chants and
hymn-tunes with so many accidentals that the choir quailed before them,
and garnished them with accidents.
Martin glanced at the organ-stops: there were “Bourdon” (which sounded
as if you were playing pedals when you were not, and was much in
request), “Open Diapason,” “Flute,” “Cor Anglais,” and a few others of
more doubtful import. He added “Tremolo” to certain other soft stops, in
curiosity as to what it meant, and began the first bar of the prelude to
“Lohengrin.” But as “Tremolo” seemed to convert other sounds into a
distant bleating of sheep, he hastily put it in. Five minutes later the
vestry-door in the transept opposite opened and the curate, followed by
his father, came out. Mr. Challoner looked up as he entered, saw
Martin’s head above the curtains of the organ, and a sudden warm tide of
thankfulness and love glowed in his heart. Surely the dear lad could not
go very far wrong, if he sought strength here.
The worshippers were but few, and it was not long before Martin was out
in the sunshine again, but with all the joy and exhilaration of the
earlier hour by the river driven out of him. Like most very emotional
people, religion was as essential to him as breathing, but in him it was
a natural, child-like religion that springs primarily from the huge
enjoyment of the beautiful things in this world, for which he had to
thank somebody. And though it would be impossible to say that it was not
real to him, yet a London fog, so to speak, would make a pagan of him
for the time being. And now, though he did believe in the truth and
reality of the service in which he had taken part, the deadly ugliness
of the church, the melancholy voices, Mr. Milton’s “Kyrie” ten times
repeated, the intolerable voices singing absurd tunes had risen like a
London fog between him and it. The service had passed over his head
like a flight of birds unseen in this dreadful atmosphere, he had heard
only the rustle of their wings. But what he had been conscious of with
every jarred fibre in his being was the gross material ugliness of the
sights and sounds of this last hour. Why should “throne” be allowed to
rhyme with “join” in sacred subjects, whereas it would be admissible in
no other class of poetry? Was it because anything was good enough in a
hymn, or because those who were responsible for the “form” of English
worship were entirely without any sense of “form” themselves? Or why in
church allow music that would be tolerated nowhere else? Or why have
windows in the house of God which for colouring and design could only be
paralleled in the worst type of suburban villa? Pitch-pine seats, tiles
again only to be found in the fireplaces of villas and the aisles of
churches! Often before, though never perhaps so vividly, had the
ugliness of Protestantism struck him; often before, though never perhaps
so insistently, had his nature, wishing to aspire, demanded beauty as
its ladder. Most of all here was beauty necessary, for the sublimest act
of all was here performed, the worship and praise of God, the
sacramental approach to him. Even as a little thing, a little rhythmical
noise, may utterly distract a man’s attention from a subject which
requires concentration, so this ambient ugliness utterly distracted
Martin. Only ugliness was no little thing to him.
He had not long to wait for his father, for he followed him almost
immediately out of the vestry, and his face lit up with extraordinary
pleasure when he saw that Martin had waited for him. Here was his
highest joy: to see his children with him in that divine act, and find
them caring, lingering for him, and the consciousness of that compact
the night before was as vividly present in his mind as it had been in
Martin’s when he left the delights of the river-bank at the sound of the
church-bell.
“Dear lad,” he said, “the first thing I saw when I came into church was
you, and I was so thankful.”
Then with the active desire to get into Martin’s sympathy he went on.
“And what was that beautiful, exquisite tune you played us before
service?”
Martin brightened.
“Ah, I am glad you liked it,” he said, cordially. “Is it not beautiful?
It was Wagner,--the beginning of the overture to ‘Lohengrin.’”
Mr. Challoner’s face grew suddenly grave. Wagner was identified with
“Tannhäuser” to him.
“Certainly it was most, beautiful,” he said; “but do you think it is
quite--quite suitable to play something from an opera in church, before
the Holy Communion, too? One wants everything, is it not so, to be of
the highest?”
Mr. Milton’s “Kyrie” occurred to Martin, but he dismissed it.
“I don’t see why one shouldn’t play an opera overture, father,” he said.
“Does not the fact that it is beautiful make it suitable?”
“But the associations of it?” said his father.
“I don’t suppose anybody knew what it was except me,” said Martin. “I am
sorry if you think I should not have played it. But really I had no time
to think. I was nearly late, and on the organ there was only a book of
dreadful extracts, chiefly by organists. But I will play something
definitely sacred at the eleven o’clock service. That is if you would
like me to play again.”
“Thank you, dear lad, thank you. Ah, what a lovely morning! Look at the
hills. ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills.’ How wonderful the
appreciation of natural beauty in the Psalms is,--‘Sweeter also than
honey,’--so many of David’s similes are drawn from ordinary, every-day
sensations, but lifted up, ennobled, dedicated. But how was it you were
nearly late? I looked into your room before I started for church and
found you had already gone!”
“I went down to bathe,” said Martin; “in fact, it was only the bell
beginning that reminded me there was service at eight.”
Mr. Challoner looked at him a moment with a sort of appeal.
“But, dear Martin,” he said, “you did not come without preparation?”
“I am afraid I did,” said Martin, and the joy of his waking hours
dropped utterly dead, while the hopelessness of the compact of the
evening before rose close in front of him.
They took a turn up and down the lawn before going in, and his father
very gently, but very firmly impressed on him the positive sin of his
omission. His voice trembled with the earnestness of his feeling, for to
him the danger of coming to the Communion unprepared was as vital as the
need for coming. He hated to say what he felt he must say; it was so
soon after their compact to try to understand one another, to get on
without perpetual correction and admonishment. But this could not be
left unsaid. Once it occurred to Martin to tell him the truth, to say,
“I came in order to please you; otherwise I should not,” but the impulse
passed. There was no need to give his father such pain as that; and he
merely assented dully where assent was needed, said, “Yes, I see,” at
intervals, and gave the promise required. But it was a dreary beginning
to the day.
The Chartries pew, the only family pew remaining in the church, was well
attended at the eleven o’clock service, Lady Sunningdale being, as
usual, the brightest object present; indeed, among the rest of the
congregation she resembled a bird of paradise which had by mistake found
its way into a colony of sparrows. But what this violation of her habits
in appearing so long before lunch had cost her none but her maid knew.
However, there she was, and the colours of the spectroscope blossomed
together in her hat, and in a fit of absence of mind, to which she was
prone, she as nearly as possible put up a pink sunshade, forgetting
where she was, to shield her from the sun which was shining through a
mauve-coloured saint on to the middle of her face in a manner which she
felt to be aggressive and probably unbecoming. So she moved to behind
the shadow of a neighbouring pillar, from where, looking at the organ,
she could see who sat there.
“Too heavenly,” she said in a shrill whisper to Stella Plympton. “Martin
is at the organ. I’m afraid he won’t play the Brahms, though. What a
pity it is not Good Friday; he would be sure to give us the Charfreitag
music.”
That, however, was not to be, and instead the familiar strains of “O
Rest in the Lord” were the prelude to which six choir-boys, four choir
men, including the carpenter, who in a fluty falsetto sang a steady
third below the trebles and believed it to be alto, advanced to their
places. But Martin, in Lady Sunningdale’s opinion, could do no wrong,
and again she whispered shrilly to Stella,--
“Is he not wonderful? That tune is exactly like the stained glass. It is
absolutely the ‘air’ of the place. Look, there is Helen Challoner
sitting with the choir. Is she not a dream? Tell Frank to look at her.”
But this was unnecessary, as Frank Yorkshire was already looking. He was
a rather stout, very pleasant-faced young man of about thirty, with
smooth flaxen hair, rather prominent blue eyes, and an expression of
extraordinary amiability, which his character fully endorsed. He was
remarkably adaptable, and while he would willingly talk flippancies with
Lady Sunningdale, his tenantry adored him for his friendliness and his
great common sense if the baby was ill or the pig would not put on
flesh. In other respects he was a Baron of the realm, immensely wealthy,
and unmarried, so that he was perpetually drenched by showers of
eligible girls, whom aspiring mothers hurled at his head. These he
returned with thanks, uninjured.
He had, in fact, many pleasant qualities and one notable one, which Lady
Sunningdale had already mentioned as being characteristic of him,
namely, his undeviating pursuit of the first-rate. It was this which
turned a character that would otherwise have been rather materialistic
into something of an idealist, and supplied a sort of religion to a mind
which otherwise, an extremely rare phenomenon, was completely atheistic,
not with an atheism into which he had drifted from carelessness or
_insouciance_, but with one that sprang from a reasoned and clear
conviction that there could not possibly be any God whatever. On all
other matters he had an open mind and was extremely willing to adopt any
opinion that seemed to him reasonable, but on this one point he was
hopelessly bigoted. This reasonableness and willingness to be convinced
had led people to suppose that he was weak. But this was not in the
least true, he was only fair. Another quality, and a fine one, was his
also: he was practically unacquainted with fear, either physical or
moral, and would, had he lived in those uncongenial times, have gone as
cheerfully to the stake for his entire absence of religious beliefs as
he would now blandly uphold his abhorrence of sport on the ground of
cruelty to animals in a roomful of hunting-men. His faculty of reverence
finally, of which he possessed a considerable measure, he exercised
entirely over the talents of other people, on whatever line they ran. He
knelt, for instance, at the shrine of Lady Sunningdale’s acute
perceptions, he hung up votive offerings to Martin’s music, he even, at
this moment, bowed the knee before the village carpenter, whose talent
for singing the wrong note was of that instinctive and unerring quality
which approaches genius.
He was a great friend of Martin’s. Helen he only knew slightly. And,
after service, desultory conversation in the church-yard ended in the
twins going back to lunch at Chartries. Though Mr. Challoner was opposed
on principle to anything, however remote, connected with festivity
taking place on Sunday, he raised no objection, merely reminded Helen
that her Sunday-school class met at three. Lord Yorkshire, strolling by
her, thought he heard a _nuance_ of impatience in her assent, and his
question had a touch of insincerity about it.
“Don’t you find that charming?” he asked. “I think there can be nothing
so interesting as helping to form a child’s mind. It is so plastic--like
modelling clay. You can mould it into any shape you choose!”
Helen glanced quickly at him.
“Do you really want to know if I find it charming?” she asked.
“Immensely.”
“I detest it. I don’t think they have any minds to mould. Why should one
think they have? But they have shiny faces, and they fidget. And I point
out Ur of the Chaldees on the map.”
He laughed.
“I suppose the chances are in favour of their not having minds, as you
say,” he remarked. “But I had to allow for your delighting in it, when I
started the subject. What do they think about then? Do they just chew
their way through life like cows? You know some people don’t chew
enough. I expect Martin doesn’t. But that is why he is so
extraordinary.” There was intention in this, and it succeeded. Any one
who admired Martin had found a short cut to his sister’s favour.
“Ah, Martin never chews,” she said. “I don’t think he ever thinks; he
just--just blazes. Now, do tell me, Lord Yorkshire, because you know him
well. He isn’t stupid, is he, because he can’t or doesn’t pass
examinations?”
“He couldn’t conceivably be stupid, any more than I could be a Red
Indian. But it is by a misguided ingenuity that he contrives not to
pass examinations. It is hardly worth while doing it.”
“Ah, do tell him that,” said Helen. “I think you have influence with
him.”
“What on earth makes you think that?”
“He quotes you.”
“Are you sure you do not mean he mimics me? He does it to my face, too,
so why not behind my back. It is quite admirable. Ah, I see he has shown
you a specimen. Don’t I talk wonderfully like him? But influence,--one
might as well sit down and think how to influence a flash of lightning.”
Helen considered this a moment.
“Well, there are such things as lightning-conductors,” she said.
“Besides, there are times when Martin isn’t the least like a flash of
lightning. He is often like a stagnant pool.”
“I don’t recognise that,” said Frank.
“No, you probably have never seen it.”
They had passed out of the narrow path from the church-yard during this,
and their way lying across the open fields, Lady Sunningdale, as her
habit was, annexed Frank as well as Martin.
“Dear Helen, it is too bad,” she said as she manœuvred. “You will have
to go back immediately after lunch. What is a Sunday-school? It sounds
so beautiful, like a hymn tune. Yes, I adore church-music; really there
is nothing like it. And it was so wonderful of you to play the
lucubrations of Mendelssohn, Martin.”
“Yes, I felt that, too,” said Frank, in his low, slow voice. “There was
a stained-glass window just opposite me which was exactly like the
tone-colour of Mendelssohn. A figure which I take to have been a
prophet, probably minor, in jewelled slippers was directing an enamoured
gaze towards a pink town,--which may or may not have been the New
Jerusalem. I always wonder where artists in stained-glass get their
botany from. Nameless herbs enveloped the feet of the minor prophet.”
Martin laughed.
“I know that window,” he said. “When I was little it used to come into
my nightmares. Now it has become a daymare. I don’t know which is
worst.”
Lady Sunningdale sighed.
“Church is very fatiguing,” she said. “I had quite forgotten how tiring
it was. I shall not go any more for a year or two. Dear me, these
tiresome shoes! And my darlings wanted to come with me. But that isn’t
allowed, is it? It is only in Scotland that dogs go to church, I think.
I went to Scotland once. I can’t bear the Scotch. They are so plain and
so extremely truthful. There is nothing in the least unexpected about
them. Dear me, there’s the other shoe. Yes, thank you, Martin. And they
use a silly slang instead of talking English. Martin, I had a talk to
your father yesterday about you. I really think I made an impression.”
“Telling the truth produces a very marked type of face,” said Frank,
“and in later life mutton-chop whiskers. That is why one always engages
butlers with mutton-chop whiskers. They are sure to be reliable.
Truth-telling is quite incurable, and so has a certain claim to
distinction.”
Martin listened to this with something of the air of a parrot “taking
notice,” and then turned to Lady Sunningdale.
“Do you really mean that?” he asked, eagerly.
“Yes, of course I do. It seemed news to him that playing the piano could
be taken seriously. And he took me seriously. There are my treasures
come to meet me. I am so hungry. Don’t jump up, Suez Canal. My
darlings!”