The big drawing-room at Yorkshire House was full to overflowing, and for
the avoidance of asphyxiation the six long windows that looked on to the
Green Park were all open. Louis Seize candlesticks, converted to the
more modern use of electric light, were brilliant on the crimson satin
of the walls, and a couple of dozen rows of chairs, all occupied, were
directed towards the end of the room where the Steinway grand stood.
Behind the chairs there was a throng of standing folk, but, except for
the voice of the piano, no sound broke the stillness. A quarter of an
hour ago the smaller drawing-room opening out of this had been full of
chattering groups, but now it was completely empty, except for some
half-dozen people who had been unable to find a standing-place in the
larger room, and crowded as near as they could to the doorway. But the
last human voice had been that of Martin.
“I’ll play it if you like,” he said, “but it will take nearly half an
hour.”
Then he sat down and, since he had played before, a hush most abnormal
during the ordinary piano solo fell on the “party” which had been
invited in after dinner. Many, no doubt, were unmusical, but more, since
it was Frank’s house and it was he who had invited the guests, had some
instinct for perfection, that bond that joins together all artists. Lady
Sunningdale, of course, was there, and had early established herself in
a front row, and Helen, who was under her chaperonage, sat next her. At
the end of the fourth _étude_ of Chopin’s, she had said to Martin:
“Martin, play the Brahms Variations,” and the demand had led to his word
of warning. But warning was not needed. If the piece was going to take
an hour, no one would have complained.
Frank, knowing the acoustic properties of the room better than Lady
Sunningdale, had placed himself in the seat of the second window, with
Karl Rusoff beside him. He had himself not felt the slightest hesitation
in asking the great pianist to listen to the recital of this wonderful
débutant, and Karl’s absolute silence at the end of the Variations
convinced him that he had been right. And as the last glorious fantasy
vibrated and died on the air, while the crowd burst gloves in applause,
he turned to him.
“Well?” he said.
Karl Rusoff nodded his great grey head up and down once or twice.
“Ah, my dear friend,” he said, “I usually think it very clever to
unearth a genius. But with your genius it needed no cleverness. Shall I
tell you what will happen? We,--the pianists, I mean,--with our nimble
professional fingers will in a year’s time be fighting each other for
seats at his concerts, if he is kind enough to give any. Let him give
one, however, just to show us, to--yes, I mean it--to let us weep over
our own deficiencies. Fire, my God, what fire! But I hope he won’t give
many. He ought--I only say he ought--to be too busy with his own work.
As regards his piano-playing, of course you were right. Who has taught
him? Nobody, I tell you. How can you teach _that_? Will I teach him?
Certainly I will, as Molière’s housemaid taught her master. He does a
hundred things quite wrong. But--ah, a big but!”
Martin had risen and bowed his thanks to the storm of applause, but his
eye sought the corner where Karl Rusoff sat, with his great grey,
leonine head and his grey eyes gleaming through his spectacles. The
latter rose and came up the gangway between the chairs and the wall
towards him and shook hands with him.
“Mr. Challoner,” he said, “that was a great treat to me. Thank you. You
can play what is really difficult, magnificently. Now, my dear young
man, I want to ask you a great favour. Attempt something much more
difficult,--that is to say, something where the notes are quite easy,
but where the rest, which is everything, must be a poem. Play, if you
happen to know it--really know it, I mean--Chopin’s fifteenth prelude,
the rain on the roof.”
Martin looked round the room, but nobody had moved from his seat, except
Frank, who had followed Monsieur Rusoff.
“Yes, I know it,” he said. “But are you sure you really want me to play
again?” he asked, with the charming horror that a nice boy has of being
a bore. “Are you sure they aren’t sick of me?”
“No, do play again, Martin, if you will,” said Frank, who had followed
Karl. “We can really stand a little more.”
“I have asked him to play the fifteenth prelude,” said Rusoff.
“Ah, yes, do,” said Frank.
So the rain beat, the gutter choked, the chariots of God thundered
overhead, one ray of sunlight gleamed, and again the rain, pitiless and
slow, spoke of an alien land. And at the end, in the moment’s silence,
more appreciative than any applause, which followed, Martin’s glance
again sought the great pianist, and with a sudden spasm of joy, so keen
that for a moment he thought he must shout or laugh, he saw that Karl
Rusoff had taken off his spectacles and was wiping his eyes.
The party that Frank had brought together that evening was very typical
of his tastes and of the position which he held in the world. Though
only thirty, thanks partly to the great wealth which was always
completely at the service of any artistic cause, but chiefly to his own
exquisite and unerring artistic sense, he had now for some years been a
sort of accredited godfather to any new talent, and for any one to “come
out” at his house was a guarantee that the aspirant was to be taken
seriously. During the three months of London season he gave a succession
of evening parties, which all had some definite _raison d’être_, chiefly
musical. And to-night he had taken special pains to get all the right
people, with the result that there were not perhaps a dozen people in
London whose opinion was worth having who were not there. And the
opinion, for once, was practically unanimous; for, though Claud Petman,
plump and short-fingered, had something to say to Henry Runton about the
lack of finality in the determination of his key-colour, and Henry
Runton, over ortolans, agreed with the additional criticism that his
phrasing of the fourth variation was a little pulpy, yet the fact that
they were critics rendered it obligatory on them to criticise. But they
had but small opportunity to express these fine differences of opinion
to Martin himself, for Lady Sunningdale, on the conclusion of the
prelude, beckoned imperatively to her “monster,” and made a brilliant
group round him. She had taken it into her head that she had
“discovered” Martin, and told every one so.
“My dear, I assure you I gasped,” she said to Karl Rusoff. “There he was
in a poky little room, furnished entirely with prayer-books, in a
dreadful parsonage, playing on a cracked tin-kettle of a piano, and
playing as he played to-night. Then in the middle his father came in and
said, ‘Go and do your Hebrew-Greek, instead of wasting your time at the
Jew’s-harp.’ Such a strange man, Flints’s brother, you know, and lives,
I believe, entirely on locusts and wild-honey and wears broadcloth, or
is it sack-cloth? Something very thick and imperishable, anyhow. Such a
beautiful life, but ascetic, not artistic,--Mendelssohn and pitch-pine,
you know. Of course, I saw at once how priceless Martin was; but we had
the greatest difficulty in persuading his father to let him come up to
London. He thinks all artists will go to hell, if they have not already
gone there. Yes. I didn’t bring my darlings to-night, because they
always bark when anyone plays the piano, and Suez Canal is so shrill.
But, is not my monster too wonderful? And now I must go. I never get to
bed till it is time to get up, and I shan’t sleep one wink after the
music. I never do. Where is Helen? Yes, she is Martin’s twin. Why aren’t
we all twins like that? Supper? How nice! I am famishing. Music always
takes so much out of one. Yes, pray take me into supper, Monsieur
Rusoff, and let us put it back. Martin, don’t dare to leave my side for
a single moment.”
Frank, in the mean time, had found a chair next Helen. The girl looked
divinely happy. Her pride in Martin, her intense pleasure in the
wonderful reception he had been given, flushed her cheek with excitement
and sparkled in her eyes. Frank had not had an opportunity of speaking
to her the whole evening, and now, as he was making his way towards her
through the crowd, delayed every other moment by some acquaintance or
friend, he met her eye long before he was within speaking distance, and
as he smiled in response to her, something suddenly thumped softly and
largely on his heart, as if demanding admittance. At last he reached
her, and she looked at him with her direct, child-like gaze.
“Thank you,” she said, “thank you most awfully.”
He laughed, not pretending not to know what she meant.
“Ah, we are all thanking Martin,” he said, “and those who know best, I
think, thank him most. Karl Rusoff, for instance.”
“Then, you were right?” she asked. “There is no mistake? He is really of
the best?”
“Yes, that is Monsieur Rusoff’s opinion.”
“I should like to kiss him,” said Helen.
“Shall I fetch him?” asked Frank.
“Not this moment. Go on, Lord Yorkshire.”
“That is a good deal already. And he will take him as a pupil, he says.
He has not consented to take a pupil for years. Now we have to
consult---- How is that to be managed?”
Helen’s face fell for a moment.
“It must be managed,” she said. “I will write to father to-morrow,
telling him all that has happened. You must write, too; Lady Sunningdale
must write. Poor father! We must give him no peace till he lets Martin
study. What are we to do?”
“You must think it over, and tell me if I can be of any use,” said he.
“I am entirely at your disposition. Anyhow, there is a fortnight for him
in London. And you? You came up to-day, did you not? Ah, before I
forget. Lady Sunningdale is coming to my box at the opera to-morrow
night. Please come, too. She, Martin, you, I. Just we four.”
Those last three words gave him extraordinary pleasure.
“But are you sure you have room for me?” asked Helen. “Lady Sunningdale
is so kind: she is dumping me at all her friends’ houses, upsetting
their dinner-tables right and left, and there is no earthly reason to
suppose they want me.”
“I want you,” said Frank, simply, and again the words pleased him.
“Thank you, very much. Where is she, by the way? Will you take me to
her? She probably wants to go home. I see people are leaving.”
“It is conceivable she is having supper,” said Frank, gravely. “Let us
go and see.”
Karl Rusoff attended to Lady Sunningdale’s wants, which were rather
extensive, but lingered after she had left, and when the rooms were
growing empty he came up to Martin.
“My dear Mr. Challoner,” he said, “I am sure you have had enough
compliments paid you by this time. So allow a very rude old Russian, who
has no manners at all, to take you into a corner and talk to you for a
little.”
Martin turned a brilliant glance, vivid, and full of huge, youthful
enjoyment on him. He knew, he could not help knowing, how complete had
been his success, and coming straight from the country and from that
home where he was officially an idler, almost a black sheep, into this
cultured, critical world, the knowledge had somewhat intoxicated him. It
was like coming out of some dark, dripping tunnel into the light of a
noonday and flying along through a kingdom that was his. For he, he had
been the central figure; round him had crowds collected, for him ears
had been alert and applause had burst. Artist as he was by nature, and
caring, therefore, infinitely more for his art then for any adventitious
success that he might achieve by it, he would not have been human, and
certainly not young, if this evening had not been honey and wine to his
boyish heart. For, except to the sour, success is sweet, and it is only
the cynic and the unsuccessful who affect to find applause hollow. And
Martin was emphatically neither cynic nor sour: the world seemed to him
the most excellent habitation. But he detached himself at once from the
group which was round him; he was still sufficiently master of himself
to know that it was probably better worth his while to listen to Karl
Rusoff talking sense than to any one else who might have pleasant things
to say, and they passed out of the supper-room into the now deserted
room where he had played.
“Now, my dear Mr. Challoner, listen to me,” said Karl. “Probably a
hundred people this evening have told you that you are a very wonderful
young man. That cannot help being a pleasant hearing, but----“
He looked at Martin’s radiant face and paused.
“Ah, my dear boy,” he said, “I will talk another time, I think. Go and
listen to what everybody else has to say to you. Drink it all in; enjoy
yourself. I am too serious. I can wait.”
“But I would sooner listen to you,” said Martin.
“Are you sure? Are you really sure?”
“Quite. Absolutely.”
“Well, then, in the sacred name of Art, forget all the pleasant things
that have been said to you. So many of these delightful people do not
_know_. Our charming Lady Sunningdale even, she does not know. She
appreciates, I grant you, but that is all.”
Martin’s face had grown quite serious; the brightness in it seemed to
have ceased to be on the surface only; it glowed beneath like the core
of a prospering fire.
“Tell me what to do, then,” he said.
“Work, and live also. Do not forget that any experience in life, so long
only as it is not sensual,--for whatever is sensual blurs and deadens
the fineness of any gift,--gives richness and breath to your power in
music. Live, then; live to your utmost and your best. Do not be afraid
of anything. Neither the bitterest sorrow that the world holds nor its
most poignant joy can bring you anything but good, so long as you
embrace it willingly, passionately. But shun a sorrow or a joy, and you
are clipped, maimed, blinded.”
The old man spoke with extraordinary fire and emphasis, and the intense
eager gravity of Martin’s face deepened. Here was a coherent code which
summed up, strung together, his own musings by the river-brink.
“Am I then to--am I to take all that comes,” he asked, “and trust that
it will somehow make grist for my own little mill?”
“Ah, you understand,” said Karl. “I see you have thought of it before.
But never call your mill little. If it is little, you may be sure that
others will label it for you. And if it is not little--then down on your
knees and thank God. Ah, my dear boy, you are all that you are. Make the
most of you. Assume there is something.”
He paused a moment.
“And I will endorse it,” he said.
Again Martin looked at him with that lucid glance as transparent as
running water.
“Yes, I will endorse it,” he repeated. “And if any one dishonours your
cheque, I will pay it.”
Martin gave a long sigh.
“You believe in me?” he asked, almost in a whisper. The rest of the
triumph of the evening, the silence, the applause, were pale and dim to
him as compared with this. The sun was rising on a dream that he had
scarcely dreamed, and it was not a dream, but a reality.
“I believe in your possibilities,” said Karl. “I believe you can
be,--well, a musician. Now, as regards another point. I have been asked
whether I will take you as a pupil. On my part I ask you to come to me.
I have not taught for some years, but I rather suspect that one’s power
of teaching increases not by teaching, but by learning. So I may be
perhaps of some use. There are certain things I can tell you. Come and
learn them. On the whole, it is worth your while. Even for a poet the
alphabet is necessary.”
Martin could not speak for a moment.
“Some day I will try to thank you,” he said at length. “But not by
words. I don’t think you want that, and also it would be idle for me to
do it.”
He paused again.
“But at present, you know, I am not even certain that I shall be allowed
to study. I--I am very stupid, you know. I can’t pass examinations, and
my father is most awfully keen about them. In any case I expect I shall
have to finish my time at Cambridge.”
Rusoff rose. Absurd and almost criminal as this seemed to him, he had no
right whatever to express that to Martin.
“Ah, then, go back to Cambridge, like a good boy, and do whatever has to
be done. Forget also almost everything that has occurred to-night. You
have won a great deal of applause. Well, that is very easy to win, and
in itself it is worth absolutely nothing. In so far as it encourages you
to good work, whether it is now in the immediate future at Cambridge or
eventually in music, there is no harm in it; but the moment it breeds in
you any slackness, or the feeling ‘this will do for them,’ it is a
poison, an insidious narcotic poison.”
He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“It is not by applause,” he said, “it is not by any help really that I
or any one else can give you that you may become great. It is in
yourself alone that the power lies, and it is by your life, by your
industry, and by the fulness and completeness of your experience and
your sympathy that you will be able to get hold of that power. For your
warning, I tell you that it is no easy task--that, mining in yourself,
you will have to think and struggle and despair before you can bring
your own gold to the surface. You will also have to find your choice by
patient, unremitting work. You cannot make others feel unless you feel
yourself, and you have to learn how to feel. It is not so easy. Again,
having learned that, you cannot convey what you feel until you have
learned speech. And, for your encouragement, I believe--or else I would
not accept you, much less ask you to be my pupil--I believe that you
will be able to do so. You have perception. You can interpret others, as
I have heard to-night. So that some day you may write that which will
give tears or laughter to those not yet born. Good-night.”
* * * * *
The summer and the season were at their mid-most, but though the former
had been fine, the latter at present had been rather objectless. Balls,
concerts, parties, all the various devices by which the crowd believes
it amuses itself, and without which it would certainly be bored, had
occurred with their usual frequency, but up till now no bright
particular star had arisen to draw the eyes and the thoughts of all to
itself. There had, in fact, been no “rage,” and neither book, play,
violinist, or traveller, nor even a cowboy from the remote West, had
appeared to fill the invitation-cards and usurp the thoughts of emigrant
London. Why nobody had invented something by this time was not clear,
for absolutely anything in the world can become the rage of one season
to be dropped either like a hot potato or a soiled glove the next. The
year before there had been a cowboy,--this year he was a hot potato, for
he had become odiously familiar; a female palmist was also still in
existence, but she was a soiled glove, since the pleasant _frisson_ of
having a bewildering future told in all the horror of detail before your
friends is an experience not to be repeated if subsequent events have
shewn the prophecy to have been altogether erratic.
But from the night of Lord Yorkshire’s concert hope began to wake in
the season’s middle-aged breast, that it, too, like most of its
predecessors, would be known by an engrossing topic to mark it out from
others before it was numbered with the colourless dead. For the
picturesque--of a picturesqueness unequalled even by last season’s
cowboy--had at length arisen in the shape of twins from Hampshire,
Challoner twins, Flints’s nephew and niece. They sprang from a country
parsonage, where Flints’s brother, whom nobody had hitherto even heard
of, lived like a sort of mediæval ascetic prophet in a lugubrious
atmosphere of fasting and prayer and scourging and sack-cloth. He
preached the most curdling sermons on Sunday, quite like Savonarola, on
the comfortable doctrine of eternal damnation. About the twins, however,
there was nothing in the least ascetic or mediæval: they were both quite
young, hardly out of their teens, and were simply Diana and Apollo come
to earth again. The girl (Helen, too) had Titian hair, in golden,
glorious profusion, a face like the morning, and the inches of a
goddess. And her charm, her bubbling spirits, her extraordinary
enjoyment and vitality! She made everybody else look like a
kitchen-maid, which was so delightful. But Martin--Phœbus Apollo, drunk
with nectar! He played, too; Karl Rusoff said he had never heard
anything like it, and the dear old angel simply wept the other night at
Frank Yorkshire’s, when Phœbus Apollo first dawned, but wept floods. And
what could have been more romantic than the manner of their appearance?
People were asked--we were all asked--to Lord Yorkshire’s for “Music” in
the bottom left-hand corner, expecting, perhaps, a couple of songs from
Maltina and a nocturne of Rusoff’s. Instead, this divine boy walks up
to the piano and plays the “Pied Piper” to us all. Yorkshire brought him
up from the country, without a word to anybody, and just shot him at
London. He hit. Helen was with Lady Sunningdale,--she always scores
somehow,--who gives out openly that she is madly in love with Martin,
and makes him imitate her, which he does with such awful fidelity that
it is impossible not to believe, if one shuts one’s eyes, that it is not
she who is talking. The only question is whether she will poison
Sunningdale and insist on marrying Phœbus Apollo, or whether he will say
“Retro Sathanas.” It may be taken for granted that Yorkshire will marry
the girl. Then, the next night they were all four at the opera in
Yorkshire’s box, next the Royal box, and nobody looked at anything else.
The girl was dressed in grey, very simple, but quite good. There was
just a touch of blue somewhere; no jewels, but that radiant face and
that glorious hair! Poor Lady Sunningdale beside her looked like a
lobster salad in the highest spirits. But really the boy is the
handsomer; and when the opera was over people simply stood on the stairs
to see them go out. But the twins were completely unconscious that it
was they whom every one was looking at, and came downstairs together,
chatting, laughing, and chaffing Lady Sunningdale because she had gone
to sleep in the second act of “Siegfried.” My dear, they are simply
divine, and we must secure them at once for dinner or something,
otherwise it will be too late.
The last sentence, whatever in this brief _résumé_ of what London said
was false or exaggerated, was certainly borne out by subsequent facts.
For London, tired with its spinster ragelessness, rose at them as trout
rise in the days of May-fly, and besought their presence, finding them,
as is not always the case with its rages, improve on acquaintance. They
enjoyed themselves so enormously, and enjoyment is a most infectious
disease, of which every hostess prays that her guests may sicken. They
danced divinely, with the same childish pleasure, all night. Whatever
the entertainment was, they were delighted, and their delight diffused
itself through the crowds of which they were the centre. And it was
always interesting to have at one’s house the girl from nowhere, who was
going to make the match of the season, and the boy from nowhere, who was
going to send the world mad with music. The twins, in fact, blazed in
the blue; they were the latest discovery, the point at which all
telescopes were aimed. And they presumably, like the latest-discovered
star, were too busy to be either pleased or embarrassed that everybody
was looking at them; they just sang and shone together with all the
other lesser stars.
Ten days passed thus, Lady Sunningdale plying the bellows assiduously
and from time to time throwing on fresh faggots of interesting and
picturesque information to feed the blaze. Nobody, not even the twins
themselves, had been more astonished than she when they shot up into the
zenith of success, for she had not anticipated anything of the kind; but
that having happened, she was quick to assume the _rôle_ of godmother.
Nothing again, a week or two before, had been further from her thoughts
than the idea that Frank Yorkshire should marry Helen; but that having
been suggested to her, it was, of course, incumbent on her to say that
she had brought them together with that express purpose, and by dint of
repetition soon got to believe it.
The allied forces mean time had concerted their attack on that very
well-garrisoned fortress known as Martin’s father. Sheets of desultory
letters were rained upon him by Lady Sunningdale, which he answered with
punctilious politeness; while Frank, in far soberer strain, told Lord
Flintshire the opinion of those like Karl Rusoff, who were thoroughly
competent to judge, begging him use it in Martin’s behalf. In
consequence he wrote soon afterwards to his brother with some
earnestness:
“You hardly ever come to town, I know, my dear Sidney,” his letter
ran, “but I really wish you would come now. It would make you
prouder than you have ever been of both your children, if you saw
them here. London, I am speaking quite seriously, has gone off its
head about them. And, indeed, I’m sure I don’t wonder. They are
absolutely entrancing; their enjoyment of it all is the most
infectious thing I ever saw, and we play ridiculous round games
after dinner instead of grumbling at each other over Bridge. And
their looks! Helen has taken the shine out of all the _débutantes_,
and yet not one of them seems to hate her for it.
“This, however, is frivolous; but I want to tell you very seriously
what an extraordinary impression Martin’s musical abilities have
made. He played the other night at Yorkshire’s house, and I assure
you all the musical lights of London simply hung on his hands. I
know nothing about it myself; but when you find a great pianist and
a great musician like Karl Rusoff listening, absorbed, to a young
man of twenty-three, whom nobody has hitherto ever heard of, one
cannot help attaching some weight to it. Others, too, so Frank
tells me, have been no less enthusiastic about him, but they are
only names to you and me.
“Well, this is not entirely unasked advice, for I remember at
Chartries a fortnight ago you consulted me about Martin and his
future. And now it seems to me there is really no choice. He must
be a musician; you cannot take the responsibility of trying to
render unfruitful a gift like his. Nor would it be any good; he is
bound to be one.
“Now, my dear Sidney, if there is any difficulty about expense, for
I gather he must study exclusively for some time, pray do not give
a thought to it. I will most gladly defray all expenses connected
with him. Pray let me hear from you as soon as possible on the
subject; and if you can run up to town for a day or two, you will
see for yourself, and be a most welcome guest at the house of
“Your affectionate brother,
“FLINTSHIRE.”
But, in spite of these appeals and assaults, Mr. Challoner shewed as yet
no definite signs of yielding. To Lady Sunningdale his punctilious
answers seemed mere frigid stupidity, and she had not the smallest or
vaguest comprehension of the struggle that was going on in his mind. She
could not understand that there was any choice to be made, still less
that the choice could be a hard one, in determining whether Martin
should once and for all close his dictionaries and open his piano, nor,
had Mr. Challoner troubled to explain to her the deep mortification that
Martin’s ill-success in classical fields had given him, would she have
been able to understand it. Karl Rusoff beckoned to him, and it passed
her comprehension that his father should not, so to speak, throw him
into the musician’s arms. She could not, in fact, with all her
acuteness, imagine in faintest outline any picture of the deep and real
perplexity which Mr. Challoner was going through, a perplexity which for
hours together tightened his mouth and ruled deep creases between the
thick, black lines of his eyebrows. The serious talks, too, which he
had with his sister evening after evening, between dinner and prayers,
and the temporary abolition of Patience, would have seemed to her, if
she had heard them, meaningless; they might as well have been conducted
in a foreign tongue of which she knew neither alphabet, grammar, or
vocabulary.
One such occurred on the evening when his brother’s letter arrived.
“I have heard from Rupert,” he said, “who wants me to run up to town.
That, I am afraid, is impossible. I have too much to do, with Mr.
Wilkins away for his holiday and the confirmation classes coming on. All
the same, I should be glad if I could. His letter has troubled me
rather.”
“What does he say?” asked his sister, folding her very dry, thin hands
in front of her.
“He says such extraordinary things. He says London has gone mad about
them. They are amusing themselves enormously, it appears,--at which, of
course, I am rejoiced; but I can’t help feeling a little anxious, a
little nervous. They are so young, so thoughtless. I don’t like the idea
of people putting all sorts of foolish notions into their heads, making
them think they are exceptional. I understand what people feel about
them well enough. Dear children, I don’t wonder at everybody liking
them. But I gravely doubt whether it is the best of them that people
find attractive, whether it is not their thoughtlessness, their
unthinking high spirits, their looks, which attract others. That is so
dangerous for them.”
Clara Challoner put the pack of cards, which had been laid out ready for
her Patience, back into their case. She did this without a sigh, because
it was her duty to talk to her brother if he wanted to talk, and duty
came before pleasure.
“That is exactly what I should be afraid of,” she said. “The qualities
that you and I, Sidney, were taught, and rightly, to consider weaknesses
and blemishes, such as irresponsible high spirits and careless gayety,
seem to me now to be regarded as virtues. The younger generation shun
earnestness and purpose in life as they would shun physical pain. Now,
look at Lady Sunningdale, with whom Helen is staying----“
“Ah, give her her due,” said Mr. Challoner; “she is a very clever
woman.”
“But to what does she devote her cleverness? To the mere pursuit of
frivolity. I wondered, as I told you before, whether you were wise to
let Helen go under her wing. She will be among people whose only aim in
life is amusement. That is the one thing they take any trouble to
secure.”
Mr. Challoner shook his head.
“I hope, I pray, I have not done wrong to let them go,” he said. “I did
it with a definite purpose, in order to let them see that sort of life.
Helen is not naturally frivolous. Look at her work here with her
classes. How admirable she is, how they adore her, how her heart is in
it. And to bring a girl up in ignorance of what the world is like does
no good. Sometimes I wonder whether I have not sheltered her too much,
kept her too much in this sweet place with all her duties and pleasures
round her. But it is not of her that I am most thinking. She will come
back unspoiled, with just the memory of a great deal of laughter and
innocent amusement. No; it is of Martin. Rupert speaks chiefly of him.”
He took from his pocket the letter he had just received and read it to
her.
“It is a great puzzle, a great difficulty to know what to do,” he said.
“Even at Cambridge, where he is surrounded by all those grave,
industrious influences, Martin does not seem to me to gain in depth or
in set purpose of life. And if I consent to this, he is plunged into
surroundings that so much more conduce to shallowness, to indulgence of
the senses. Thank God, I believe my son is pure. But he is so
impressionable, so easily stirred by enjoyment into thoughtlessness,
that I am very much afraid.”
He got up and moved over to the window, where he stood looking out. In
front the ground sloped sharply away down to the church-yard, where in
the last fading light of evening the grey tower stood like a shepherd
watching over its flock among the gravestones, below which rested the
bodies of those entrusted in sure and certain hope to its hallowed care.
Like all strong, hard-working men, Mr. Challoner was far too much
occupied in the duties of his strenuous life to give much thought to
death, except as to some dim, quiet friend whose hand some day he would
take without fear or regret. But how terrible death could be, and how
terrible it would be to him if through carelessness or biassed judgment
he had chosen wrongly for one so dear to him, so peculiarly entrusted to
his care. How terrible, again, would be that quiet friend if, through
want of wideness in sympathy, he had tried to nip, to starve, to stifle
a gift with which God had endowed his son.
Then suddenly with a wave of bitterness all that he had planned in long,
sweet day-dreams, years ago, for Martin filled his mind as the harsh
salt-water fills a creek. He had seen him a scholar, minute,
painstaking, absorbed, perfecting himself in accuracy and subtlety of
mind by the study of the great classical authors. He would be a fellow
of his college, and his father, so he pictured to himself, would live
over again his own college-days, which perhaps were the happiest in his
life, when he saw Martin seated at the high-table among the masters of
learning, or in professorial gown crossing the dear familiar grass of
the quadrangle to the grave grey chapel on summer afternoons when the
sun made jewels of the western panes, or in winter when the soft, mellow
glow of candles shone dimly by the dark oak stalls and scarcely reached
to the vaulted fans of the roof.
Then the picture took large lines. With the wealth and position that
would one day be his, there was no limit to the influence that Martin
might have in an England which even now seemed to him to be dozing in a
stupor of contented unreligious, unintellectual enjoyment. There was
need of a scholar, a man with a great position, a man of strong
Christian faith to arise who, with a life unselfish in its aims,
liberal, charitable, encouraging all sorts of godly learning and
scholarship, should give to the world a strenuous, intellectual ideal
again. How often in his prayers had that vision risen before him, that
future which he desired so eagerly for his son, and which, so he
believed, was humanly possible for him. Chartries should be again what
it had been four generations ago, the centre of the scholarly,
intellectual men of England. The accounts of those days in the history
of Chartries read to him like a wonderful true fairy-story. Three or
four times in the year the house was filled by his great-grandfather
with men of learning, and after breakfast and morning service in the
chapel they would meet and discuss till dinner-time some exquisite point
of scholarship or hear from some expert of the latest discoveries in the
Roman forum. At these discussions his great-grandmother, a woman of
culture and knowledge, had always been present. She had once even read a
paper on the Elgin marbles, then but lately come to England, in which
with a marvellous subtlety and accuracy of observation she had upheld
the view, in the face of strong attack, that they were Greek originals,
not Roman copies. This and all other papers read there were preserved
among the printed “Horæ aureæ Chartrienses,” which was the record of
these gatherings.
For Martin, then, he had dreamed a life like that,--the life of a
cultured, scholarly, Christian gentleman, not monkish, but with a brood
of growing children round him, busy at his books, busy in all matters of
education, instant in prayer, and a churchman staunch to uphold the
rights and the glory and the privileges of the Mother of his faith.
Instead, he was asked to give permission that Martin, after years of
expensive education, which had ended in utter failure, should devote
himself to music, or as Mr. Challoner put it to himself, to playing the
piano,--a profession which, to his mind, was akin to a sort of
mountebank’s. Nor was that all. If it was only in intellectual
attainment that Martin had shewn himself desultory and idle his father
would, it is true, have deeply regretted it; but it would have been as
nothing compared to the anxiety he felt with regard to that slackness
and indolence of character which he thought he saw in him. Left to
himself, he would lounge the day away, not only without acquiring
knowledge of any kind, but without a thought as to the strengthening and
building up of his own character. He would scribble amusing sketches by
the score, play on the piano by the hour, or, as like as not, lie on the
grass and smoke, in purposeless waste of these infinitely precious hours
of youth. Had he ever shewn interest in matters naval, military, or
political, his father would gladly have seen him a soldier or a member
of Parliament. But he was purposeless, desultory, without aims or
interests, and so utterly unlike himself in every point of character
that he could scarcely believe he was his son. And this estimate was no
new one; ever since Martin was a little boy, through his school life and
through his three years at the University, he had noticed the same
drifting weakness, the same tendency to take any amount of trouble to
save trouble. Nothing had made any impression on him,--not his
confirmation, nor his growing responsibilities as he rose in the school,
nor the duties attaching to the sixth form when he was dragged up into
it, nor the widened life at Cambridge. It was all one to him. He had the
pleasant smile when things went well, the yawn when effort was demanded
of him, the eternal drifting towards the piano.
All this passed through his mind with the rapidity of long and bitterly
familiar thought.
“They all urge me to do it, Clara,” he said; “yet they don’t know him as
I do, and they are in no position of responsibility with regard to him.
I can’t see my way at all. It is no use his continuing to waste his time
at Cambridge,--and yet London for my poor, rudderless Martin! What
influences may he not come under? Who is Rusoff, of whom Rupert speaks?
But I must settle. It is no use putting off a decision that has to be
made.”
He turned away with a sigh from the window.
“In any case, he had better come home for a day or two before he goes up
to Cambridge,” he said, “so that I can talk it all over with him. In
fact, they had both better come home. They have been in town a
fortnight,--a fortnight of pure amusement. Besides, the Parish library
wants looking after.”
“I can manage that, if you would like Helen to stop a little longer,”
said his sister.
“No, dear, your hands are full enough already. Besides, Rupert’s letter
has made me altogether a little uneasy. It is time they both came
home.”