Helen, as Lady Sunningdale had mentioned, had to start back again for
her Sunday-school soon after lunch. They had all moved out under the
cedar on the lawn, and when she arose, Lord Yorkshire also got up and
offered himself as an escort. This was perfectly agreeable to the girl,
though she wondered exactly how high Aunt Clara’s eyebrows would rise if
she knew that her niece might have been found walking on Sunday
afternoon with a young man who could not possibly be brought under the
elastic bonds of cousinship. But the eyebrows of Lady Sunningdale, who,
it must be supposed, was chaperone, remained low and level, and the two
started.
Frank had been admirably entertaining in his own way during lunch,
capping the extravagancies of Lady Sunningdale with incongruities that
rivalled her own, and giving wings of epigram and paradox to his speech;
but Helen had received a very distinct impression that under his
flippancy, which Martin imitated so faithfully, there lay something of
sterling and very human solidity. And this unknown factor interested her
quite apart from and much more than his conversational fireworks, which
were as obviously superficial to the essential “he” as his eyebrow or
moustache. Perhaps he also knew the unimportance of their leadings, for
certainly, as soon as they were alone, such coruscations died slowly
down, and it seemed to Helen that a very pleasant mellow light, restful
after fireworks, took its place.
“I think it is unkind of you not to admit me into the school itself,” he
was saying. “Why am I to be debarred from the knowledge of Ur of the
Chaldees? Geography has an enormous fascination for me. I can pore for
hours over maps of countries which I have never seen and almost
certainly shall never see, just reading the names of unheard of places
with gusto.”
“Ah, you feel that, too,” she said. “Martin always tells me I am a
gypsy. Certainly I want to wander, to go on just for the sake of going
on. The exploration, that is the point. And I think it is the playing at
exploration that is so fascinating in a map. Dictionaries, too,--new
words. And, best of all, new books with new ideas.”
“There is one thing better,” said he; “I cap your new books with new
people, new ideas.”
The personal note entered, however slightly, into this, and Helen was
silent a moment.
“Ah, but new books implies new people,” she said. “Nothing can be more
real than the people in some books.”
“Quite true; and nothing can be less real than some people in real life.
Do you know what I mean? One wonders with some people if there is
anybody there. My impression is that there often isn’t.”
“I have an aunt----“ Helen began, and stopped, feeling that it was not
quite kind to lay Aunt Clara on the dissecting-table.
Frank guessed this.
“Ah, I have three,” he said; “perhaps mine will do.”
Helen laughed, and, after a moment, he went on:
“I believe that curiosity which is a convenient expression to sum up
all this passion for the new,” he said, “is quite modern. I don’t think,
at least, that the generation to which our aunts belong had it, with
certain adorable exceptions, like Lady Sunningdale, anything like to the
extent we have it. What was good enough for our grandfathers was nearly
good enough for our fathers. But what was good enough for our fathers is
not nearly good enough for us.”
She turned a quick, luminous glance at him. He was talking about things
that very much concerned her.
“Ah, that is interesting,” she said, eagerly. “Give me more news of
that.”
“It has struck you, too?” he asked.
“Your saying it reminds me that I knew it all the time.”
“I know what you mean. Yes, I think it is the case. At any rate, take
yourself, Martin, and me,--all, I expect, quite normal people. Well, we
all want to wander, to experience everything. We are probably not really
afraid of any experience that could conceivably happen to us. And we
claim the right to all experience. We claim the right to our own
individuality, too. It seems to us quite certainly ours; the only
possession we have which is inalienable. We may lose everything else,
from our character to our teeth, but not our individuality. Do you
remember how Magda throws her arms wide, and cries, ‘Son Io!’--‘I am I’?
That somewhat important point had never struck her father or mother.
Poor things! They thought she was a sort of them. Is that bad grammar?”
Their way lay at this point through one of the game covers, and a sudden
piteous crying, dreadfully human, arose from the bushes near the path.
Helen stopped with fright and horror in her face.
“A child--is it a child?” she asked.
“No; nearly as bad though,--a hare,” said he, and pushed his way through
tangled bracken and brambles in the direction of the sound. In a moment
he called to her.
“Will you come here, Miss Challoner?” he said. “Come round to the right:
it is a clearer path.”
She followed his directions, and found him kneeling a few yards off,
holding in both hands a hare that was caught by the hind-leg in a
horrible jagged-toothed trap.
“Pull the two sides of the trap apart,” he said, “as quickly as you can.
Be quick. The poor brute is struggling so I can hardly hold it.”
His voice was so changed that she would hardly have recognised it. It
was no longer low and courteous, but sharp and angry. She knelt down by
him and, exerting her full strength, did as he bade her. The leg was
caught only by the skin, and holding the animal in one hand he gently
disimpaled it where the iron teeth had clutched. But just as it was free
a sudden tremor of nerves passed through Helen at this humane surgery;
the trap slipped from her hand, and caught Frank’s finger just at the
base of the nail. He took his breath quickly with the pain and let go of
the hare, which, none the worse, ran off up the winding path down which
they had come.
“I must trouble you to open the trap once more,” he said, the blood
streaming from his finger. But now his voice was quite normal again.
“Oh, I’m an absolute fool,” cried Helen. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and again
she wrenched the trap open.
Frank was rather pale, but he laughed quite naturally.
“Thank you so much,” he said, as she released his finger. “What strong
hands you have. But I should dearly like to clap that thing on the nose
of the brute who set it. What an infernal contrivance. How can men be
such butchers! I shall take it and show it to your uncle.”
He shook the blood off his finger and bound it tightly round with the
handkerchief.
“Oh, Lord Yorkshire, I’m so sorry,” said Helen again. “I am an absolute
born idiot. How could I be such a fool?”
He laughed again.
“My dear Miss Challoner,” he said, “nothing whatever has happened which
can justify your violent language. Besides, it would have been worth
while to set that poor, jolly beast free at the cost of real pain, and
not just a finger-scratch. Well, we’ve vindicated the liberty of one
individual anyhow. Did you see its eyes? They said ‘I am I,’ like
Magda.”
He held the bushes back for her to regain the path.
“But you’ll have your finger attended to?” she said.
“Yes, at once, please. I’ll ask you to tie it rather tighter, if you
don’t mind the sight of blood. I always think blood is such a beautiful
colour,” he chattered on, to prevent her apologising further. “One talks
of a blood-red sunset and admires it, and dragon’s-blood china; but when
it comes to the real article, so many people shrink from it. That’s
better, thanks; that’s excellent. I assure you it is nothing at all.”
His manner was so entirely natural that there was nothing left for her
except to be natural too; and they walked on out of the cool,
green-shadowed path, flecked here and there with the sunshine that
filtered through the trees that met above them, into the blaze and
brightness of the fields that bordered the church-yard.
“Yes, the cry of Magda for her right to her own individuality,” he said.
“At last this generation has said, ‘I will lead my own life, not the
life dictated to me by other people.’ I wonder what we shall make of
it.”
Helen looked at him again, eagerly.
“And do you mean that the assertion of one’s own individuality is a
duty?” she asked.
“Ah, that is a difficult question. Certainly, I think there are--are
indications that one is supposed to play one’s hand for all it’s worth.
But duty? Probably you and I mean different things by it.”
“I mean the will of God for me,” she said, simply.
They paused at the gate into the church-yard, and their eyes met. It
seemed to Frank that she waited for his answer with some eagerness. And
he shook his head.
“No, I don’t mean that,” he said.
She held out her hand to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I, very sorry, indeed. But I can’t help it.”
Her eyes wandered over the woods behind him. Then came back to his face.
“No, I recognise that,” she said. “Good-bye, Lord Yorkshire. Thank you
so much for coming with me. And please have your finger attended to.”
She smiled at him and went up the church-yard path towards the shining
corrugated-iron Room. As she passed the walk leading to the vicarage,
she met her father.
“You are nearly ten minutes late, Helen,” he said.
“I know, dear. I am sorry. But you know you are late, too.”
He did not smile.
“I was detained by other parish work,” he said. “I was not amusing
myself. Pray do not delay any longer.”
The evening meal on Sunday at the vicarage was of a strictly Sabbatical
order, and consisted of cold things to eat and no waiting on the part of
servants. It took place late after evening church and had, to Martin’s
mind, a dreariness of its own, an individuality (to which Frank would
have said it undoubtedly had a right) which marked it off from all other
meals. Every one was fatigued with the exercises of the day, and though
they were religious exercises which had produced that fatigue, it
brought with it a tendency which made cheeriness difficult. However,
cheeriness was not a quality exactly encouraged by Mr. Challoner on
Sunday, so perhaps that was all for the good. But this evening, Martin,
who had spent the whole afternoon at his uncle’s, coming back only just
before supper, was conscious of a Sunday easily got through, and was
chattering on with a good deal of rather thoughtless enjoyment about
Lady Sunningdale, every now and then mimicking, with extreme fidelity,
some more than usually incoherent speech of hers in which Wagner, her
dogs, South Italy, her husband, egg-shell china, and scandal were about
equal ingredients, without noticing a somewhat ominous gravity that was
deepening on his father’s face.
At length Mr. Challoner spoke, interrupting him.
“There, dear Martin, is not that enough? It is Sunday evening, remember.
Cannot we find something rather more suitable to the day to talk about?
And you would scarcely like Lady Sunningdale, who is so good to you, to
know that you imitate her.”
“Oh, she is always insisting that I should do it to her face,” said
Martin. “I often do. She shrieks.”
“That is enough, I think, Martin,” said his father again, mindful of
their compact of the evening before, and determining to be gentle. “Have
you only just come back?”
“Half an hour ago,” said Martin, the gleam in his eye suddenly quenched,
for he knew what the next question must be.
“Then, you did not go to church this evening?” asked his father.
“No; I had been twice.”
Now, Mr. Challoner had been from church to Sunday-school and from
Sunday-school to church practically since eight that morning, and it not
in the least unreasonable that he should be tired with so many busy
hours in ill-ventilated places on so hot a day. The effect of this
tiredness on him, as on most of us, was shewn in a tendency to that
which, when it occurs in children, their elders label “crossness.” And
he answered in a tone in which that very common emotion was apparent.
“I was not asking you to justify your absence,” he said, and the meal
proceeded in rather dreary silence.
Then two small incidents happened. Martin dropped a plate with a
hideous clatter, and a moment afterwards upset a wineglass, which he had
just filled with claret, all over the table. He apologised and wiped it
up, but, unfortunately, looking up, he saw his father’s face wearing
such an extraordinary expression of true Christian patience that for the
life of him he could not help giving a sudden giggle of laughter. He
could not possibly have helped it; if he was going to be hung for it he
must have laughed.
Now, the laughter of other people when we ourselves do not see anything
whatever in the situation to provoke mirth is one of the authentic
trials of life, especially if one half suspects, as Mr. Challoner did
now, that one is in some manner inexplicable to one’s self the cause of
it. It was therefore highly to his credit that, remembering the
interview he had had with Martin the night before, he could manage to
keep inside his lips the words that tingled on his tongue. Of more than
that he was incapable; he could not just then be genial or start a
subject of conversation, he could only just be silent.
Martin could easily manage that; his last observation had not found
favour, and he held his tongue and ate large quantities of cold beef.
Helen sitting opposite her father, in the absence of Aunt Clara, who was
spending the Sunday away, had also nothing apparently which she
considered as suitable, and the meal proceeded in silence. Then, after a
long pause, she raised her eyes, which so happened to catch Martin’s,
who was still struggling with his unseemly mirth. At this moment also
her father looked up and saw a glance which he interpreted into a glance
of meaning pass between them, a thing irritating to the most placid
temperament. He saw, too, the corners of Martin’s mouth twitching. This
was too much.
“I will not have that sort of thing, children,” he said, his voice
rising sharply. “It is an extremely rude and vulgar thing to exchange
glances like that.”
Martin’s merriment was struck as dead as beech-leaves in frost.
“I was doing nothing of the kind,” he said, his temper flashing out.
“Helen looked up at the same moment as I looked up. We all three looked
up, in fact. It was purely accidental.”
Helen was vexed that Martin should speak so, but felt bound to endorse
him.
“Indeed, father, it is so,” she said.
Again the silence descended, and Martin, seeing that both his father and
sister had finished their meat, changed their plates and arranged the
second course. After a very long pause their father spoke again.
“I should have thought my children might have had something to say to me
in the evening when they have left me alone all day, enjoying themselves
elsewhere. Has nothing happened to you since breakfast which I am worthy
of hearing?”
Martin’s intolerance of this injustice again stung him into ill-advised
speech.
“I tried to tell you what I have been doing,” he said, “but you stopped
me. You said it was unsuitable,” and his handsome face flushed angrily.
Then a thing unprecedented happened.
“I beg your pardon, dear Martin,” said his father.
* * * * *
Helen was engaged next morning in the fragrant labour of picking
sweet-peas, when a maid came out of the house to say that Lord
Yorkshire was there. Her father and Martin she knew were both out, and
she went in to see him, concealing from herself the quite perceptible
thrill of pleasure that the announcement had given her. She was, as
usual, hatless, and her hair was in golden disarray from the breeze, and
as she went towards the house she took off her gardening gloves, trying
by sundry pats and pokes to give it some semblance of order. She was not
very successful in this, nor need she have been, for she looked to him
like some beautiful wild flower when she entered.
“I ought to apologise for coming at this unearthly hour,” he said, “for
my only excuse is that Martin left a book of music at Chartries, and,
having an idle morning, I thought I would bring it over.”
Helen was delighted to see him, and since it would have been ungracious
to convey the impression that this morning visit was a bore, especially
since it was not, she took the straightforward line.
“How good of you,” she said. “And the finger?”
He held up a bandaged hand.
“I am only reminded of it by that,” he said.
“I am so glad. Isn’t it extraordinary that any one could be so awkward
as I was. I am always dropping and spilling things. Martin used to say,
‘It is a lovely day, let us go and spill something.’ But he is much
worse than I am, really. Do come and look at the garden. It is really
pretty.”
“And are you gardening?” he asked, glancing at the gloves.
“Mildly. I am really only picking sweet-peas. It is so nice of them--the
more you pick the more they flower.”
She picked up her basket as they walked out and held it up to him.
“How energetic of them,” he said. “Ah, what a delicious smell. That
reminds me of lots of nice things. It will now remind me of one nice
thing the more. Smell is the keenest of all the senses to remind one of
things. Sight and hearing are not nearly so intimate. And Martin is
out?”
“Yes; he went to try and get a fish. But there is too much sun.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” said Frank.
“I think I am, too, really,” she said. “But I do like the dear boy to be
pleased.”
“Well, I hope we are all going to please him,” said he. “For the
combined armies are going to advance and rescue him. Lord Flintshire,
Lady Sunningdale, and, in my own humble manner, myself, are all going to
try to get your father to allow him to study music in earnest. In fact,
I am a sort of skirmisher in advance of the heavy--of the main body. It
is my business to bring on the general engagement by asking him to stay
with me in London, and bringing some people, who really know, to hear
him play.”
Helen turned a radiant face on him.
“Ah, that is good of you,” she said; “and it is really angelic of me to
feel that, as I shall be left here all alone.”
“But the scheme includes you. Lady Sunningdale is writing to you to ask
you to come up with him and stay with her for a week or two. I hope you
will say ‘Yes.’”
Helen gave a long sigh, as Moses, perhaps, sighed on Pisgah.
“I don’t know if I could manage it,” she said, “though it would be
heavenly. Perhaps, as Aunt Clara comes back in a day or two, I could
leave father. But I don’t know. Oh, I should enjoy it,” she cried.
“I expect you have a very fine faculty for enjoyment,” said he.
Again the personal note entered, but this time it did not make her
pause.
“I? I should just think I had. And I love London in little raids like
this, it is so full of charming things to do. But Martin,--it is good of
you, Lord Yorkshire. And do be very good for him. Do use your influence
with him. Do make him, at any rate, work hard to pass his examination at
Cambridge first. It would make everything so much easier, so much
happier.”
“For him?” he asked, with a marked intonation.
“Yes, and for all of us.”
He looked at her gravely.
“That sounds worth while,” he said.
He let that string vibrate, as it were, for a moment or two, and then
passed on.
“But what becomes of the liberty of the individual which we talked of
yesterday?” he said. “To influence anybody always seems to me a slight
infringement of rights. One imposes one’s personality--such as it is--on
another.”
“Ah, but in a good cause, to show him the stupidity of not passing
examinations. Surely, that is a rule absolutely without exception, that
it is always wise not to be stupid.”
He laughed. Helen, with her direct vivid personality, seemed to him
unlike anybody else he had ever seen, with the exception, perhaps, of
her twin. The extraordinary and rather rare charm also of perfect
naturalness, not the assumption of it, was hers also.
“Well, it is certainly hard to think of any exception to that rule,” he
said, “though one always distrusts rules without exceptions. It seems so
very unlikely that they should exist, considering how utterly different
every one person is from every other. On the face of it, it seems
impossible.”
This had aroused another train of thought in the girl.
“Oh, nothing would be impossible, if one were wise,” she said. “Oh, I
hate fools. And I am one.”
And she snipped viciously among the sweet-peas.
He followed this with some success.
“Was the Sunday-school very stupid?” he asked, sympathetically.
“Hideously--quite hideously. How clever of you to guess. It was also
extremely ugly. I don’t know which I dislike most, ugliness or
stupidity. In fact, they are difficult to tell apart. Yet, after all,
beauty is only skin deep.”
“But what has that to do with the wonder of it?” he asked. “That
particular proverb seems to me about the silliest. Why, the most subtle
brain in the world is only a few inches deep, and, as far as measurement
goes, it is about the same depth as the most stupid. Or would you say
that the beauty of some wonderful evening moment of a Corot was only
skin deep, the depth of the paint on the canvas? Surely not. It has all
the depth of beauty of the summer night. No, that proverb is perfectly
meaningless, and was probably invented by somebody more than usually
plain.”
Helen’s basket of sweet-peas was full, and she emerged from the fragrant
tangle of the garden-beds and strolled with him up the lawn, her face on
flame with what he had called curiosity. That divine moment, when a girl
becomes a woman, when all she has drunk in all her life begins to make
products of its own had just come to her. And at this psychological
moment he had come, too.
“But surely one sees very beautiful people who are very dull, very
stupid, very wicked even,” she said. “Is not that what the proverb
means, perhaps, that as far as beauty itself goes it is only a very
superficial gift?”
He shook his head.
“Look at that splendid Gloire de Dijon,” he said. “It may be very
stupid, very dull, very wicked, as far as we know. But that does not
concern us. It is beautiful, and its beauty does not, anyhow, touch us
only superficially, but very deeply. Does not beauty stir in you some
chord of wider vibration than any purely intellectual quality? Some--how
shall I say it?--some longing for the infinite?”
Again their talk had taken the bit in its teeth, and as she gently
fingered the rose he had pointed to, her lips drew themselves into a
quivering curve of extraordinary tenderness.
“Ah, yes, yes,” she said. “I could kneel down and thank God for it.”
He looked at her gravely, remembering the conclusion of their walk the
afternoon before.
“You are very much to be envied,” he said. “With my whole heart I
congratulate you.”
She raised her head, dismissing the gravity of the last minute.
“Ah, but the Sunday-school,” she said.
“But I envy that, too,” said he. “It, as well as you, has its _beaux
jours_. You would not grudge it them?”
She laughed.
“Ah, you have committed an inanity,” she said. “I was so afraid you were
a person who never said anything stupid. But to pay compliments is
stupid. And now I have been rude. That is even more stupid.”
“I think it is,” said he, “because it is also unnecessary.”
There was a further challenge in this, but she did not take the glove he
had flung, and having reached the tree at the end of the lawn underneath
which, three days ago, the ill-fated “Mill on the Floss” had lain, they
turned back again towards the house, and she directed their talk, like
their steps, in another direction.
“It is good of you,--I mean about Martin,” she said. “That is just what
he wants, to go among people who will take him and his music seriously,
not gasp just because he plays extremely fast. No one here really knows
the difference between Rule Britannia and the Dead March. And
yesterday--oh dear! oh dear!” And she broke out laughing.
“There isn’t much,” observed Frank, parenthetically. “But please tell me
about yesterday.”
“I think I must, because, though you will laugh, you will laugh kindly.
It was at the early service, and the dear boy played the overture to
‘Lohengrin’ as a voluntary, and my father thought it wasn’t quite
suitable.”
He considered this a moment.
“Do you know, I don’t think I want to laugh at all?” he said. “I
understand perfectly.”
“But Martin didn’t. That was so funny.”
“No, he wouldn’t. That is one of the penalties of genius. In fact, it is
what genius means. It is having one point of view so vivid that all
others are dark, invisible beside it. And genius is always intolerant.”
Her eye brightened.
“I don’t know if you know or not,” she said, “but I expect you do. Is
Martin really all that,--dear, stupid, old Martin?”
“I believe so. We are going to get him to London to find out. You will
give him my message, won’t you? I go up to town to-day, and he may come
any day he likes; the sooner the better. Lady Sunningdale is writing to
you.”
“Oh, it would be heavenly!” said she.
He took his leave soon after, and went back to Chartries for an early
lunch, since Lady Sunningdale, who never started anywhere in the
morning, unless it was impossible to get there otherwise, had retained
his services in order to minimize the dangers and difficulties incident
to travel by rail with Suez Canal and Sahara. For Sahara had an
unreasoning dislike of locomotive engines, which had never, at present,
hurt her, and always tried to bite them, while Suez Canal, whenever it
was feasible, jumped down between the platform and the train and smelled
about for whatever there might be of interest among the wheels of the
carriages. In addition to these excitements, their mistress never moved
without a tea-basket, a collapsible card-table,--which usually
collapsed,--a small library of light literature, a jewel-case, so that
the tedium of a journey in her company was reduced to a minimum, since
when the train was in motion these recreations could be indulged in, and
when it stopped there was more than enough to be done in collecting
these priceless impedimenta to prevent any companion of hers from
feeling a moment’s boredom that arose from idleness.
She also could hardly ever produce either her own or the dogs’ railway
tickets when called upon to do so, thus giving use to games of
hide-and-seek all over the carriage.
And to-day, in addition, Frank had something very considerable of his
own to think about, something that made him very alert, yet very
inattentive, that brightened his eye, yet prevented him seeing anything.
And he could almost swear that the odour of sweet-peas pervaded the
railway carriage.
Martin, mean time, was spending the morning on the banks of the stream
which had given him those good moments early the day before. But to-day
the sun was very hot and bright, and after an hour’s fruitless, but
patient, attempts on the subaqueous lives, he abandoned the vain
activity of the arm, and with the vague intention of returning home and
getting through some Æschylus before fishing again towards evening, sat
down to smoke a cigarette in the fictitious coolness, bred by the sound
of running water, preparatory to trudging back across the baked fields.
Tall grasses mixed with meadow-sweet and ragged-robin moved gently in
the little breeze that stirred languidly in the air, but the sky was
utterly bare of clouds and stretched a translucent dome of sapphire from
the low-lying horizon of the water-meadows on the one hand up to the
high yellowing line of the downs on the other. At his feet flowed the
beautiful stream, twining ropes of shifting crystal as it hurried on its
stainless journey over beds of topaz-coloured gravel or chalk that
gleamed with the lustre of pears beneath the surface. Strands and
patches of weed waved in the suck of the water, struck by the sun into
tawny brightness, shot here and there with incredible emerald, and tall
brown-flowering rushes twitched and nodded in the stress of the current.
Suspended larks carolled invisible against the brightness of the sky,
swallows skimmed and swooped, and soon a moorhen, rendered bold by
Martin’s immobility, half splashed, half swam across the stream just in
front of him. And he thought no more of the fish he had not caught, but
sat with hands clasped round his knees, and, without knowing it, drank
deep of the ineffable beauty that was poured out around him on meadow
and stream and sky. Every detail, too, was as exquisite as the whole:
the yellow flags that stood ankle-deep in the edge of the river were
each a miracle of design; the blue butterflies that hovered and poised
on the meadow-sweet were more gorgeous with the azure of their wings and
white and black border than a casket of lapis-lazuli set with silver and
shod with ebony.
By degrees as he sat there, his cigarette smoked out, but with no
thought of moving or of Æschylus, the vague and fluid currents of his
mind that for years had coursed through his consciousness, though he
himself had scarcely been conscious of them, began for the first time to
crystallize into something illuminating and definite. Like some
supersaturated solution of chemical experiment, his mind, long crying
out for and demanding beauty, needed but one more grain of desire to
render its creed solid, and to himself now for the first time came the
revelation of himself, and like a spectator at some enthralling drama,
he watched himself, learning what he was, without comment either of
applause or disgust, but merely fascinated by the fact of this new
possession, his own individuality, and, even as Frank had said to Helen
only yesterday, his own inalienable right to it. It was none other’s but
his alone. There was nothing in the world the same as it, since every
human being is a unique specimen, and, bad or good, it was his own clay,
his own material, out of which his will, like some sculptor’s tool
should fashion a figure of some kind. And everything he saw, the yellow
iris, the blue butterfly, the water-weeds, were in their kind perfect.
Their natural growth, unstunted by restraint or attempt to control them
into something else, had brought them to that perfection; and was it
conceivable in any thinkable scheme of things that man, the highest and
infinitely most marvellous work of nature, should not be capable of
rising, individual by individual, to some corresponding perfection?
Soil, sun, environment were necessary; the flags would not grow in the
desert, the lark would not soar nor carol in captivity, but given the
freedom, the care, or the cultivation which each required, every living
and growing thing had within itself the perfection possible to itself.
Up to this point his thought had been as intangible as a rainbow, though
like a rainbow of definite shape and luminous colour, and showed itself
only in a brightened, unseeing eye, and in fingers that twitched and
clutched till the nails were white with pressure round his flannelled
knee. Then suddenly the crystallization came, ungrammatical, but
convincing.
“It is me,” he said aloud, as Magda had said it.
In a moment the whole solution was solid.
Beauty. That was the food for which every fibre of his nature hungered
and with which it would never be satiated. Long ago he had known it, but
known it second-hand, known it as in a dream, when he quoted Browning,
three days ago, to his sister. But that dream, that second-hand
information, had become real and authentic. No matter how trivial might
be the experience, that was what he demanded of all experience,--whether
he ate or drank, it was beauty he craved; whether he ran or sat down, he
knew now that, in so far as it was consciously done, it was the thrill
of speed, the content of rest that he demanded of the function. Then,
suddenly, he asked himself what he demanded in the exercise of the
highest function of all, that of worship--Was it the pitch-pine pew, the
magenta saint, the tuneless chant? Was it the fear of hell, the joy of
an uncomprehended heaven, even though the gate-stones of the New
Jerusalem were of jaspar and agate? Not so; for what did he worship?
Absolute beauty, that quality of which everything that is beautiful has
some grain of mirrored reflection. That was God, the supreme, the
omnipotent, present in all that was beautiful just as much as he was
present in the breaking of the Bread and the outpouring of the mystic
Wine, for all was part of Him.