Helen was sitting again at the deal table in the “Room,” trying to
balance the accounts of the quarter. A money-box, cheap but not strong,
probably made in Germany, with a florid ornament of tin tacked on round
its maw, stood open by her left hand, and on the table was a heap of
money, consisting chiefly of pennies and small silver coins,--the
subscription to the “Room” being threepence a quarter,--while by her
right hand was a pile of equally mean bills, chiefly ending with a
halfpenny, for brown holland, cotton, slate-pencils, needles, and gum.
There was a discrepancy somewhere of ninepence, but add and subtract as
she would, that ninepence held its ground like the remnant of the Old
Guard. Had it been only deficit, the remedy from her own pocket would
have been easy, but, unfortunately, there was ninepence too much, and,
though her conscience would not have made any protest at her supplying
it, it did not permit her either to pocket it or to forge a non-existent
bill. And all the time her natural impatience, mixed luckily with a
certain sense of humour, said to her, “Is it possible to conceive a less
profitable way of wasting time than in trying to make ninepence vanish?”
Her father, however, with the attention to detail which was so marked a
characteristic of his, always looked over the accounts afterwards, and
whether there was a discrepancy of a thousand pounds or a penny it made
no difference, the principle of admitting discrepancy was equally
dangerous in either case.
The twins had been at home, in a state of total eclipse for two days of
ominous parental silence. Mr. Challoner, as usual, was busy; Helen was
busy also, for after her absence there was more than enough at present
to occupy her day. But she had not yet broached the subject that was at
the root of the silence: until the skies cleared a little she felt
absolutely unable to do so. Her father also had said nothing about it;
they ate, they drank, the weather was mentioned, and the danger of
trouble in the East. Mr. Challoner himself, except when he read prayers,
had hardly said half a dozen words in Helen’s presence: it was
“good-night” and “good-morning,” and both were bad. Martin also was, so
to speak, in prison, though not, like his sister, in the condemned cell.
He read Demosthenes in his father’s study while the latter was writing
his sermon, fell asleep and was detected, awoke, and wrote a futile
supererogatory set of Greek iambics containing several false quantities
and forms of aorists previously unknown and very interesting.
This morning Helen had received a letter from Frank that troubled her,
for he pressed, where he had only hinted before, for some definite sort
of date. Reasonably enough, he saw no cause for delay; he knew that in
spite of her father’s feelings she had accepted his devotion; that was
all her’s, waiting for her to reward it. The tone was not querulous. If
it had been, the letter she must write would have been less difficult.
It was simply and sincerely trustful. But before she wrote she must talk
to her father; that could be put off no longer.
For the moment, however, the “sad mechanic exercise” of the accounts
occupied her attention. But, though the superficial brain which was
employed on addition had its work before it, all that was round her--the
walls, the floor, the aspect of the room, the neat, new brown-holland
covers of the library--took that part of her brain that really felt and
lived back to the day when she sat there last. The map of geological
strata was there, too, with its auriferous belt, and she remembered very
well Frank’s words about that: “There is a gold-bearing vein in all we
are set to do. The trouble is to find it.” Yes, indeed, that was the
trouble. She did not rebel against the superfluous ninepence, except,
indeed, humorously; but what seemed to her such hard and barren rock was
the living in this hopeless silence. Her conscience, her whole sense of
moral obligation, had accepted the principle indicated to her by the
dear aunt--sofa-cushion no longer--of this wider self-completion to be
attained by behaving rightly in all relations of life. But at present
she had been throwing good money after bad. The dutiful daughter had
come home. No more notice was taken of her than of a mended window-pane.
Mr. Challoner always opened doors smartly. Thus, when the outer door of
the “Room,” which gave on to a small lobby where wet coats were hung,
gave a quick rattle of latch, she knew, with the same certainty as she
had known the crisp foot on the gravel, who came.
“Have you finished the accounts?” he said.
“I can’t get them quite right, father,” she said. “I think----“
“You have the bills and the receipts, have you not?” he said. “Where are
they?”
Helen resented this, but silently; no shadow of it appeared in her face
or voice.
“They are all here,” she said. “I have ninepence more than I should.”
Mr. Challoner sat down and counted up the silver and pence, arranging
them in neat shilling heaps with all the care he would have given to a
total of millions. Then rejecting her addition, he added up the
receipted bills, and her mistake, one of pure carelessness, was patent.
“That balances them,” he said. “Perhaps I had better do the accounts for
the future. If I have to do them in the long run, I may as well do them
at once, instead of wasting your time over them.”
Helen stood up, her resentment shewing itself a little.
“Certainly, if you prefer,” she said.
He did not answer, but ran a metal clip neatly through the receipted
bills, and swept the coins back into the money-box. Then he turned to
her quickly.
“What do you intend to do, Helen?” he asked. “As your father, I think I
have a right to ask you, since you have shewn no sign of wishing to tell
me.”
The gulf between them seemed to her at that moment immeasurably wide,
and his tone was harsh and cruel,--it cut her, but cut like a blunt
knife, with sawing and tearing.
“Father, don’t speak to me like that,” she said. “I can’t bear it, and
it does no good. I am trying, and I am going to continue trying, to do
my duty to you----“
For one moment the sternness vanished from his face.
“You are going to give him up?” he asked.
“No; but I am going to live quietly here if you will have me, for the
next six months,” she said, “doing my work in the parish just as usual.
During that time I will not see Frank. If you wish, I will not even
write to him, except just once.”
She sat down again opposite him.
“I want to do something for you, which is hard for me,” she said. “I
want to make you believe that I am trying to be a good daughter to you.
I know we disagree vitally and essentially. But is that any reason why
the dearness of our human relations should be diminished?”
Her voice sank, but looking at his face she could see that the momentary
brightness as he asked the last question had vanished again, and he sat
looking, not at her, but out of the window, without replying.
“Father,” she said, gently, “I have spoken to you.”
He shook his head, then looked at her.
“It is useless,” he said.
Then suddenly the chilling reserve and silence of the last days gave way
like ice before the South wind.
“My God!” he said, speaking more to himself than to her. “What have I
done? What have I done? Has this come for some dreadful fault of mine of
which I am ignorant? All your life, Helen, I have tried to train and
teach you in the knowledge and fear of God. As He sees me, I have done
my best, according to my lights. Never once to my knowledge have I not
prayed every day that His blessing should guide and illuminate every
step you take. And I cannot believe--that is my difficulty--that you
try to follow His will in this. It is impossible that----“
He broke off with a sudden helpless raising of his hands indescribably
pathetic.
“God help us both,” he said.
There was a long silence, and his fingers clenched and unclenched
themselves as he sat staring dismally out of the window. All her life,
as he had said with absolute honesty, he had tried to bring Helen up in
the knowledge and fear of God, and this decision of hers, from which he
now realised he was powerless to move her, was like some overwhelming
blow struck at him from the dark. He could not understand, he could not
even conjecture in the vaguest way, what it meant or how he was meant to
take it. In sorrow, renunciation, bereavement, it was, at any rate,
possible to acquiesce in there being a design. But that his child should
do this was inexplicable. It could not be the will of God. Something of
this Helen read in his face, and she saw, for the first time fully, how
the blow had staggered him. His strength had given way under it; all
vehemence and anger was dead; and dead, too, was the hope that she would
come round to him. He was helpless. And the strangeness of that in one
so certain, so accustomed to go without hinderance or obstacle along the
straight road of his God-fearing life touched her with a profound pity,
so that for a moment, had he but known it, her decision flickered and
wavered like a candle-flame blown about in a draught. She questioned
herself whether such suffering could be right, whether that which caused
it could be justifiable, whether at whatever cost to herself or another
she could permit it to be. It was like the suffering of some
animal,--blind, uncomprehending, a thing intolerable. And the animal
that suffered was a strong man and a wise, and her father.
She sat down on the edge of the table beside him.
“Oh, poor father, poor father!” she said.
He looked at her with a wretched semblance of a smile.
“Ah, that is not the point, Helen,” he said. “What I feel, all my pain,
is nothing, nothing. Why I feel it is everything, dear. Oh, you poor
girl, blind, blind.”
Then, at last, that tie between father and daughter or mother and son,
one of the immutable and indestructible things of the world, stirred,
vibrated, made music, and for a moment across the infinite gulf between
them their spirits and their hands met.
“Dear girl,” he said, “it will be delightful to have you at home. I was
afraid that those happy days of work, you and I, side by side in this
home, were over. I thank you for that, Helen; your father blesses you
for that. Stop with me as long as you can. How long you--and he must
settle. And, my dear, I am so selfish as to take your offer fully. Do
not see him or write to him. Perhaps----“
He paused a moment, stroking her hand.
“And try to make allowance for me,” he went on, “when I am hard or
gloomy or out of spirits. But I am so utterly at sea: my landmarks have
gone. I don’t understand. I can only pray that you and I may have light.
God bless you, my dear, now and always.”
Helen wrote the same day to Frank:
“MY DEAREST,--I have just come home, and I have settled to do a
thing which is very hard on both of us; but I cannot do otherwise.
Frank, we cannot be married yet. We must put it off for six
months, or seven, is it not,--till next May. And for six months I
must live quietly at home here, and not see you. There, it is
written. This, too: you are absolutely free. Ah, in spite of all
these troubles, I can’t help smiling when I write that.
“But I can’t act otherwise. My father is in a state of misery about
it which I can’t describe to you. Somebody he loves is
deliberately--this is how he sees it--going to do a wicked thing.
This morning, when he talked to me about it, I wondered whether I
could be right in continuing our engagement at all. But I can’t
give you up. My love for you is the best part of me, and the most
living part. You see I _am_ yours. Oh, my dear, if only things had
been otherwise,--if you could believe! If you could only have not
told me, have let me think you were a Christian. No, I don’t wish
that really. It would not have been you.
“He is my father. All my life he has watched over me, prayed for
me, loved me. Even if he had been a bad father, I should still have
owed him all I am, until the day I met you. And the only way in
which I can repay him anything is by doing this. It is small
change, I know, for all his gold, but it is all I have. At least,
then, and at most I must do it. I must stop here with him,--he was
such an old darling when I told him,--trying to be cheerful, trying
in little, tiny human ways to be a good daughter to him. And it is
all so infinitesimal. It is as if I gave him remedies for a cold in
the head when he had cancer. I feel so mean in offering him so
little. But there is only one other thing that I could offer him,
and that I cannot. And, indeed, though this looks so little and
makes little show, it costs me something. It does indeed.
“And I must do something more. I think I must not even write to
you. While I am here I must have no connection with you. It would
be incomplete without that. One letter you must send me, when you
have thought this over, to say that you agree with me, if you can.
“And if you cannot? I must do it all the same.
“Do you remember telling me of Magda’s cry? That, too, tells me to
do it. I should be stunted, selfish, if I did not.
“Ah, Frank, my darling, be good to me. I long for you every day,
and it is going to be so awfully dreary without you.
“HELEN.
“I walked through the wood to-day where you set the hare free. I
shall walk there every day. And I looked at the geological map with
the ‘auriferous reef in it. Martin is here.”
The letter was not difficult to write, though the final determination to
write it was so hard that when it came to the paper and ink she sat long
with pen undipped, unable to begin. But the memory of the bewildered
misery in her father’s face that morning as he sat looking out of the
window in the Room had given her a real sense of responsibility towards
him. It was her business to find some anodyne for that. Perhaps the
proof before his eyes, kept there day after day and week after week,
that she wanted to do her best, might serve. Anyhow, at the moment it
had awakened his humanity and his fatherhood; his hand had reached to
her across the gulf; two puzzled, blind folk had clasped hands in the
darkness.
Nor was the waiting for Frank’s answer difficult,--she knew him so well.
And she was not disappointed here; the very brevity of the reply was
honey to her.
“DEAREST,--You must do as you must do. Magda says so, and so do I.
But I am rather low, though she tells me not to be.
“FRANK.”
But it was then, when she had made the difficult determination, and
Frank had so ungrudgingly consented, that Helen’s difficulties began.
Each day was an endless series of infinitesimal knots, not to be cut,
but each to be patiently, cheerfully unravelled. Each singly she could
tackle, but she had to avert her eyes from the future, for the series of
knots stretched into dim distance. All day, too, there was with her the
desire to see Frank, just once to see him, and perhaps cry a little on
his shoulder; all day, too, there was the face of her father, always
sunless, always grave. He had never, it is true, been other than austere
in his domestic life, but then Helen had always known how deep was his
love for her. But now it seemed to her sometimes as if he was trying to
stifle and extinguish it; that knowing, as he did, there was soon to be
an irrevocable rupture between them, a rupture that would divide them
further than death divides, he was schooling himself to get used to it,
as a man may school himself, when he sees one he loves in the pangs of
mortal illness, to adjust himself beforehand to the loss that is coming.
The marks of his suffering, too, were pathetically plain, and again and
again she asked herself whether she had not only increased it by doing
that which cost herself so much. Was it only an impulse of barren
sentimentality that she had followed? Was she like a surgeon who gives
an ineffective anæsthetic which should not deaden or mitigate the wrench
and shock that was coming?
The encouragement she could find was but small. But it was this, that in
any case she had done what was most difficult and what seemed, not only
to her, but to Aunt Susan, to be right, and as such was fully accepted
by her lover. Yet what if, after all, this was a mere senseless
mutilation of herself, an objectless asceticism?
It was this doubt that day after day most troubled her. Had she seen the
least sign of bud on the barren stem she would have been much more than
content. But the days became weeks, and there was still none, not even
any return of the moment’s tenderness her father had shewn at their
first talk. She could not see that any practical good was coming of her
renunciation. Like a wrecked sailor on a raft, she watched, as for a
sail, for any horizon-distant sign that her father accepted her marriage
and gave her credit--though she did not want the credit herself, but
only longed for the evidence of it--for doing her best. But there was no
such sign. He continued to use the prayer for Turks, infidels, and
heretics.
What made things worse was that Martin, the beloved twin, with whom
disagreement was a thing unthinkable, radically disapproved of what she
was doing, and his disapproval, she was afraid, was terribly
practical,--namely, that it was quite certainly no use. Two things,
however, after some three weeks of what seemed fruitless endeavour, kept
her to it. One was a letter from Aunt Susan, to whom she had sent a
despairing sheet, containing a memorable sentence: “God does not always
pay on Saturday, Helen,” she had said. The other was an innate pride
that forbade her to accept defeat. Here she feared also to lose the
respect not only of her father, but of Frank.
“Yes, my darling, you tried it,” she imagined him saying, “and you found
it was doing no good.”
And that he should say that was somehow intolerable to her. Whatever she
might be, she would not be feeble. “The lame and the blind that are
hated of David’s soul” seemed to her a very legitimate object of
detestation. She would not give a thing up because she mistrusted her
power of doing it.
Thus her apparent failure consumed itself. With the divine confidence of
youth, the less successful she seemed to be the more she spurred herself
on to strive. All her sense of right had told her, when she made her
decision, that she would thus be doing her best; her judgment was
arrived at coolly and sanely, and the present practical ill-success of
it argued nothing against the principle.
Then came a crowning despondency and agitation in something Martin told
her after he returned from a visit to Lady Sunningdale. The short
history of that visit, however, claims an episodic precedence.
* * * * *
Lady Sunningdale had sent her motor over from Fareham to fetch Martin,
and when he arrived, about tea-time, he rushed straight out on to the
lawn to find her, but only encountered the chilling looks of several
total strangers who were talking about fiscal problems and seemed
surprised, if not pained, to see him. This was discouraging; and he was
wondering what place there was to flee unto, when a footman came out
after him to say that her ladyship was in her bedroom and wished to see
him there immediately. Martin could not help giving a little giggle of
amusement at this, and the footman, preceding him upstairs, threw open
the door and announced him.
The room was large and very rose-coloured, on the principle of Lady
Sunningdale’s famous maxim that bedrooms should be optimistic. She
herself was reclining on the optimistic silk coverlet of her bed, with
her shoes off and the blinds down.
“Is that you, monster?” she asked. “I am an absolute wreck. Yes, pull up
one blind and sit down at a respectful distance. Martin, you must
promise to play absolutely all the time you are here, like a barrel
organ, or I shall die. I shall send a footman to you after each time
with twopence on a tray and orders that you are not to move on. The
house is crammed with perfectly dreadful people. I cannot imagine why I
asked them. I hope you have not brought your gun, because I shan’t let
you go shooting. You will have to talk to me all day, except when you
are playing. Don’t tread on Suez Canal, or you’ll be drowned. Frank is
here, and Stella. Otherwise--my dear, why are politicians so impossible?
And why is Helen behaving like a mad-woman. Really, I thought she had
more brains.”
Martin had pulled up one blind during this and revealed the room. There
were pink-silk walls, on which were several pictures of Lady Sunningdale
of not very recent date, a pink carpet, white furniture, and a
particularly large and pink bed. Lady Sunningdale, fenced, like Egypt,
on the one side by Suez Canal and on the other by Sahara, was lying
propped up by a quantity of huge pillows and cushions. French books with
yellow covers bestrewed the bed, and fragments of chewed pages suggested
that the dogs had eaten one, like Jezebel, leaving only a few very
indigestible pieces. A French maid hovered uneasily about a
toilet-table, and appeared to be putting things in drawers. Considered
as a wreck, finally, Lady Sunningdale looked particularly large and
sea-worthy.
“Miss Plympton?” asked Martin, in an extremely disengaged voice, but
with his face suddenly infected by the prevailing optimism.
Lady Sunningdale drew conclusions before most people could have arrived
at data.
“Yes; ever since you played to us at Chartries she has been trying to
learn the ‘Merry Peasant,’” she said. “She is not getting on very well;
but art is long, is it not. So is life. Too long, I think, sometimes.
But, my dear, the rest of them! They talk about fiscal problems and what
they’ve shot. Even Frank appears to be vaguely interested in free trade
or free food or free drinks or something, which is deplorable of him. I
expect him here immediately. My bedroom is the only place where one can
be free from those intolerable bores. There are three, three cabinet
ministers in the house! Really, politics ought to be considered a
dangerous habit, like morphia. In fact, there is a very great
resemblance between them. They are both drugs that send me to sleep, and
the habit grows on one. You have to take more and more, and the result
is death of the intellect, which is quite as lamentable as death of the
body, and renders you far more tiresome to other people. For, after all,
when one’s body is dead one is put away. But people whose intellect is
dead are not put away at all; they pervade society. There is no one in
the world so lost as the intellectually lost. How big hell must be!
Talking of that, how is your father? What a bear!”
Martin had settled himself in a rose-coloured chair, and gave a great
shout of laughter, suddenly checked.
“Quite well,” he said. “He always is.”
“Yes, that is so like him,” said she. “But, really, have you any strain
of insanity in your very extraordinary family? My darlings, did I kick
you? Oh, Sahara, naughty! All that book, and I hadn’t read it.
_Commandez du thé, Hortense._ So convenient, she doesn’t know a word of
English. Did you ever see such a murderish-looking woman? But she can
make hats out of a tooth-brush and some waste-paper. Some day she will
kill me for my diamonds, and find out afterwards that they are paste.
Then she will be sorry, and so shall I. Do attend, monster. Can you tell
me why Helen, head over ears in love with him,--that was why I brought
them together,--should behave like that? Shutting herself up with the
bear and that dreadful aunt of yours who plays Patience. And Frank
thinks, in some confused way, that it is so beautiful. He looks so funny
when Helen’s name is mentioned, rather like a widower, who hears a
hymn-tune in four sharps on Sunday evening. So frightfully
old-fashioned, that sort of thing. Those two find a sort of spiritual
thrill in standing a hundred miles apart and shouting ‘Caro mio! O
Carissima!’ to each other at the tops of their voices. I can’t bear that
sort of Platonic love. Yes, you Challoners are all mad. If Becky Sharp
lived with Savonarola in a grand piano, you would find a little
Challoner crying on the drawing-room carpet one morning.”
“Why Becky Sharp?” he inquired, parenthetically.
“Only to add a little _joie-de-vivre_. No imputation on your morals.”
Lady Sunningdale struggled to a sitting attitude on the bed. Several
French books flopped to the ground, and were instantly worried by the
dogs: _Zó’hár_ and _A Rebours_ flew in gnawed fragments about the room.
Martin agreed with Lady Sunningdale in the view she took of Helen’s
conduct, but he felt bound to defend his sister against so wild an
attack.
“Anyhow, she’s doing a difficult thing because she thinks it right,” he
said. “Give her credit for the difficulty.”
“Difficult?” cried Lady Sunningdale. “There is no merit in doing a
difficult thing just because it’s difficult. I might just as well try to
stand on my head in the drawing-room and say to my wondering guests,
‘Admire me, please. Though foolish, this is difficult, and is only
accomplished by prayer and fasting.’ Is that profane? I think it must
be, because my father was a Nonconformist, and whenever I say anything
without thinking, it is nearly sure to be a reminiscence of my unhappy
childish days, and comes out of the Bible. But it doesn’t prove that a
thing is the least worth doing because it is difficult. She is standing
on her head, then? And in a parsonage, too!”
“Yes, it amounts to that,” said Martin. “But with a moral purpose.”
There was a discreet tap at the door and Hortense entered with tea.
“Ah, muffins,” said Lady Sunningdale, in a mollified tone. “The
under-piece, please, Martin. How delicious! But, though I am not
cynical, I always a little distrust moral purposes. If you do a thing
with a moral purpose, it usually means that you do it because if you
didn’t you would be uncomfortable inside. Good people are such
cowards,--they are afraid of a little pain in their consciences. To
avoid that they go and act in some foolish, antiquated manner, and every
one says, ‘What a saint!’”
Then, out of all this nebulousness, like the gathering clouds of a
thunder-storm, there leaped a sudden flash, like lightning, and rather
like genius.
“She is doing sacrifice to an ideal she doesn’t fully believe in,” she
said. “Helen doesn’t believe in certain things as your father does. Else
she would never marry Frank at all. She would have screamed loudly for
help when he asked her, instead of saying ‘Yes.’ Her sacrifice,
therefore, isn’t quite sincere.”
Then a sort of confusing roar of thunder followed, marring the sharp
conclusiveness of the lightning.
“I cannot bear seeing people making a mess of their lives,” she said,
“and it is such a pleasure to see them make a really clean job of them.
Yes. Why continue poking round in a parsonage, when you have made up
your mind to go away? It is like ordering the carriage to go to the
station, and then, for no reason, saying that you will go by the next
train. She has shattered the happy parsonage life, and is feebly trying
to pick up the bits, instead of ringing the bell and leaving the Room.
It is silly.”
“Ah, Helen is not silly,” said her brother.
“I did not say that. Yes, slap Sahara twice, hard. But I said she is
doing a silly thing. Now, I am silly, but I hardly ever do a silly
thing. Yes, come in. It must be Frank. Sunningdale never knocks, and
nobody else ever comes in.”
Frank appeared at the door.
“I was sent for,” he said, apologetically. “Ah, Martin.”
That rang true. “You are her brother,” was behind it, and the romantic
touch did not escape, though it rather irritated, Lady Sunningdale.
Personally, she disliked romance on the general grounds that in real
life it was old-fashioned. To her the two completely satisfactory
methods of expression were melodrama and farce. And Frank’s greeting to
Martin, the hand on the shoulder, the linked arm, was all romantic, and
just a little tiresome.
“Frank, what have you been doing with yourself all day?” she cried. “I
have not set eyes on you. But, of course, if you do prefer golf and
Chinese labour to my inspiring conversation---- Yes, help yourself to
some tea, and all the muffin there is.”
But Frank still lingered by Martin.
“How is she?” he said. “Is all well? Any message for me? No, of course
there can’t be. She meant that. But she is well?”
He sat down on the foot of the rose-coloured bed.
“Dear lady,” he said, “I have done both. I went out playing golf with a
colonial secretary, I think, and we talked about fiscal problems. Then I
drove off into the bushes and lost the ball. So I said, ‘Will the price
of golf balls go up?’ Then he drove into the bushes, too, and he said,
‘I expect so. So we will not look for them for a year. They will then be
more valuable than they are now, but will require painting.’ Lucky golf
balls! The longer most of us live the less valuable we become.”
Lady Sunningdale rather resented this.
“The older people become the more paint they want,” she said, “but the
other is absolutely untrue. Until people are of a certain age they are
of no value at all. I hate boys and girls. You only just escape, Martin;
and I don’t think you would unless you could play like an elderly
person. Young people want airing; they want to be out in the world for a
time to get ripe. Tact, now,--tact and good temper are quite the only
gifts worth having, and tact is entirely an acquired quality. Until all
your edges are rubbed down, you cannot have tact. People with edges are
always putting their elbows into others, instead of rolling along
comfortably. You have no tact, Martin, and Helen, it appears, has less.”
Frank held up an appealing hand.
“Ah, please, Lady Sunningdale,” he said.
“Dear Frank, it is no use saying ‘please,’” cried she; “Helen is
behaving idiotically. She ought to have smoothed the Bear down somehow;
deceived him for the sake of his comfort. Martin, I think, would deceive
his friends to make them comfortable. Considering how dreadfully
uncomfortable life is, the first duty towards our neighbour is to try to
make things pleasant. You, too, Frank, you have no tact. You ought to
have said the Ten Commandments, or whatever it is, very loud, in the
vulgar tongue, when you went to the Bear’s church, and then there
wouldn’t have been any question at all. I would be a Parsee or a
Plymouth sister to-morrow if it would make Sunningdale groan less. He
has taken to groaning. I suppose his mind hurts him, as he says he’s
quite well.”
“Did you say that I would deceive people to make them comfortable?”
asked Martin.
“Yes; at least I hope you would. But you Challoners are all slightly
cracked, I think. You owe your vividness to that. You, Helen, your
father, all see things out of their real proportion.”
“Have you ever seen Aunt Susan?” asked Martin.
“No; is she dreadful?”
“Not at all, but not vivid. It was she who really made Helen go home and
live there.”
“Then your Aunt Susan is a very stupid person,” said Lady Sunningdale.
“My dear, there are only two sorts of people in the world, the clever
and the stupid. Nobody is good, nobody is bad. At least, they may be for
all that it matters, but goodness and badness in themselves have no
result. There is nothing more colourless than moral qualities; it is
only brains that give colour to them. Do you choose your friends because
they are good? I am sorry for you. Of course, I don’t want you to choose
them because they are bad. The one is as idiotic as the other. But
brains! There is nothing else in the world, and very little of that. And
moral qualities are like corsets. If they are tight they hinder free
development, and if they are loose, you might as well not wear them at
all.”
Lady Sunningdale had taken her feet off the bed during this remarkable
speech and looked more closely at Martin.
“Your forehead is bulging, Martin,” she said, “and your hair is dipping
like a plume into your left eye. That happens, I notice, when you play,
and it means you are thinking. So you are thinking now. What is it?”
Martin did not deny the soft impeachment.
“Yes, I was thinking,” he said. “I don’t imagine that what I was
thinking about would interest you in the least.”
Lady Sunningdale made a gesture of despair.
“Haven’t you grasped the elementary fact,” she said, “that anything
anybody thinks about is deeply interesting? All the events of the
world--who said it--take place in the brain. Sahara, darling, I am not a
mutton bone, nor are my rings good to eat. Suez, how tiresome! And I
hadn’t read a page of it! Yes; what were you thinking about, Martin?”
Martin lit a cigarette from a smoked-down stump before he replied.
“I was thinking whether I was going to join the Roman Church,” he said.
Lady Sunningdale gave a deep, contented sigh.
“That’s the sort of thing I really like,” she remarked. “Poor Bear! Now,
why, why, why do you want to do that? Yes, turn Sahara out, Frank; she
is so restless. Suez Canal always follows her. And shut the door. Now
close your eyes and think, Martin, for a minute if you like, and then
tell me why?”
Frank said, under his breath, “I thought so,” and returned to his chair
almost on tiptoe. Martin did not close his eyes at all, but looked at
him.
“Frank knows why, I expect,” he said, “though I haven’t hinted it to him
till this moment. Why is it, Frank?”
“Well, in one word, ‘Beauty,’” said he.
Lady Sunningdale was completely bewildered.
“Incense? The Virgin Mary?” she suggested, vaguely.
Martin frowned. For a moment he looked exactly like his father.
“Ah, what is the use of my telling you, if you say that sort of thing?”
he asked.
“But I really haven’t an idea,” said she. “Did I say anything dreadful?”
“Frank, speak. You know,” said he. “I never know what I am talking about
when I begin to talk.”
“It is only a guess.”
“You have guessed right. I believe you are always right.”
“Well, get on somebody,” said Lady Sunningdale, with a show of
impatience.
“All is Beauty,” said Frank, “and knowing this is Love, and Love is
Duty.”
He smiled across to Martin.
“You quoted that, you know, to Helen,” he said, “on the day your father
found ‘The Mill on the Floss.’”
“What did he find the mill on?” asked Lady Sunningdale. “Oh, I see.
George Eliot, isn’t it? How dull! I read a book of hers once, ‘Scenes
from Something,’ and thought it so like your father’s house, Martin. But
all is Beauty, is it? I should have said almost everything was ugly.
Anyhow, what has it all got to do with the Pope?”
Lady Sunningdale’s discursiveness, the reader will have noticed, was
liable to put in an appearance at any time, even when she was really
interested. She herself explained this by the fact that she never
thought about less than three things at once. Consequently, when she
opened her mouth, any of the three was liable to make its escape.
“Yes, that is it,” said Martin, answering Frank’s last remark. “I am a
Christian, and I cannot any longer be of a church that leaves out beauty
from its worship. Why, if you love a thing, if you believe in a thing,
you must approach it through beauty, it seems to me.”
He paused a moment, and then the words came as they had never come
before. A sudden clearness of vision was his. He saw his own thought
with precision, and he could at that moment of self-revelation delineate
it very accurately.
“Why, when one’s friends come to see one,” he said, “one makes the room
tidy. If you came to see me at Cambridge, Lady Sunningdale, I should
take down my pipe-rack and put it in my bedroom, I should sweep my
hearth, I should give you a clean tablecloth for lunch, I should get
flowers for the table, I should practise something which I thought you
would like to hear me play. I should, in my small way, put all the
beauty at my disposal at yours, and put the ugliness away. But--but take
Chartries church. How beastly!”
Martin paused a moment. Frank was observing him quietly from underneath
his hand, for the afternoon sun was pouring its light from the window
where Martin had pulled up the blind full into his eyes. The boy seemed
to him at this moment suddenly to have grown up, become vivider, to have
thought for himself. Crude, elementary, unconvincing it all might be,
but it was original. And Martin’s next words endorsed his opinion.
Certainly he was not a child any longer.
“How dare they? How dare they?” he cried. “A wheezy organ; awful
wood-work; terrible windows. Is there anything more hideous in all
England than Chartries church,--unless it be a county jail for the
confinement of prisoners? Because it is for God, will anything do?”
There certainly was crudity here. Frank felt that, though Lady
Sunningdale did not, for her indifference on religious matters was
perhaps the profoundest thing about her. He had enquired and rejected,
she had never even looked in that direction. Martin had enquired, too,
and found an awful Presence. And he was ashamed to call in old clothes,
so to speak. What was at the service of God was his best. All that was
not best was an insult. And his face flushed suddenly.
“Why, if that church was my room, and you came to see me, I would cover
up the stained glass,” he said. “I would make it decent. I would, I
would----“
He paused for a moment, then found the word.
“I would have ‘form,’” he said. “I would give you politeness. I would
not say, ‘She knows me; she will understand,’ and sit with you in a back
bedroom, slops about, tooth-brushes, anything. But because God
understands, are we to say ‘Anything will do?’ Why, when the Queen came
to Chartries we had four courses for lunch and a red carpet.”
He broke off suddenly.
“Do you understand what I mean?” he demanded of Frank.
Frank understood perfectly, for he had known a long time what Martin had
only just learned,--that “form” governed his life. For he did and always
had done everything he believed in as well as he could do it, lavishing
thereon all the pains and trouble at his command, with the instinctive,
open-handed generosity of love. These pains he did not bestow
grudgingly, nor count the expenditure; whatever was worth doing was more
than worth all the pains he could possibly bestow on it. That impulse
lies at the root of every artistic temperament, endless trouble for ever
so minute a perfection, ever so infinitesimal a finish. But Frank, like
an equitable judge, had to state the other side of the case to Martin.
“What will your father say to it?” he asked, using the most commonplace
phrase.
Martin looked at him quickly.
“Same as he said about you and Helen,” he remarked.
Lady Sunningdale could not help a little spurt of laughter, the repartee
was so exquisitely simple. But she checked it at once.
“But it’s too awful for him,” she said. “First Helen and then you.
Martin, do you think you ought----“
“I don’t know, but I must,” said Martin.
“But it doesn’t hurt you to play a creaky organ. And the stained-glass
windows don’t hurt you.”
Frank had seen further than this.
“How necessary do you feel it?” he asked. “That is the whole point. Is
it as necessary as--as Chopin?”
The door opened and Hortense entered.
“_Sept heures et demi, madame_,” she said.
Lady Sunningdale started to her feet.
“Monsters, you must go at once,” she cried. “Yes, dear Martin, it is
_too_ interesting! You will play to us this evening, won’t you? So glad
you could come; and did you ever see such a mess as the dogs have made?
But those things don’t hurt you any more than brushing one’s teeth
hurts, though it cannot help being a terribly inartistic performance.
And you ought to consider Helen, as well. Not that it matters what
church one belongs to, as far as I can see. Sunningdale might become a
Parsee to-morrow if it would make him any happier, only there really is
no sun in England; so I don’t see what he would worship. How nice always
to sit in the sun and say one was worshipping! Yes. You extraordinary
boy, fancy your being religious in your little inside. I should never
have guessed it. But you got quite pink when you talked about Chartries
church. Most religious people are so dull. Is that a dreadful thing to
say, too? Dinner at eight. Take him and shew him his room, Frank.”
* * * * *
Lady Sunningdale certainly had the knack of bringing quite unique
combinations of people together and of making them behave quite
characteristically of their respective selves. She herself--this may
partly account for it--behaved with such child-like naturalness that it
was quite impossible for those with her to be self-conscious. As a
hostess she was quite incomparable, for rejecting all known conventions
which are supposed to be binding on that very responsible class, instead
of behaving to each of her guests as if he was a mere unit in the
colourless mass known as society, she talked direct and unmitigated
“shop” appropriate to each. To-night there was present among her guests
a traveller in Central Thibet, to whom she talked cannibal-shop, so much
encouraging him that his account of his adventures became scarcely
narratable; an astronomer who knew Mars better, it appeared, than the
majority of dwellers on this terrestrial globe know the county in which
they live; several cabinet ministers who received relays of telegrams
during dinner (always a charming incident), their wives, whose main
preoccupations were appendicitis, golf, and babies; a duchess of
American extraction, who shied violently when the words “pig” or
“Chicago” were mentioned; and a German princess who, when directly
questioned, seemed doubtful as to where her husband’s principality lay,
and was corrected on the subject by the astronomer. But owing perhaps to
the advent of the Twin (the name by which Lady Sunningdale referred to
Martin), though she had previously confessed that she found her guests
“dreadful,” to-night she went bravely ahead, steering a triumphant
course over shoals where she grounded heavily and dashing on to rocks
that should have made a wreck of her. The dinner-table was round; she
herself set an excellent example by screaming over smilax and
chrysanthemums to the person most distantly removed, and Babel, that god
so ardently worshipped by hostesses, shed his full effulgence over the
diners. Thibet and the Chaldæans easily led on to astronomy; astronomy
to the observatory at Chicago, which occasioned a sudden and thrilling
silence; and from the United States it was but a step to fiscal problems
in which all but the cabinet ministers laid down incontrovertible
opinions. Then golf let them into the circle again; and the story of a
golfer being carried off the first tee after a futile drive, and
expiring an hour later from an operation for appendicitis, while his
wife was being confined, was charmingly to the point. In fact, the
desultory rapidity of conversation left nothing to be desired, and all
was due to Lady Sunningdale’s inimitable plan of talking shop to the
shop-keepers.
Later, Martin played, there was Bridge, and Lord Sunningdale, as usual,
went to sleep, and, on awaking, revoked, subsequently explaining the
revoke to the satisfaction of everybody but his partner, who remained
dissatisfied to the last. Women took bed-candles, men gravitated to the
smoking-room, though, since every one had previously smoked in the
drawing-room, this seemed unnecessary. But, the fact is one without
exception, men left alone leave drawing-rooms.
Soon, again, after the long day’s shoot, the smoking-room yawned itself
to bed, and cabinet ministers, the traveller, and the astronomer being
gone, Frank was left alone with Martin. There was no design in the
matter,--both hated going to bed as much as both detested getting up,
but they were neither of them sorry to have the opportunity of more
talk. Frank had got up from his chair on the last exit, took a
whiskey-and-soda, and moved to the fireplace.
“Lady Sunningdale is extraordinarily clever,” he remarked, “but I can no
more discuss anything with her than I could with a dragon-fly. She is
always darting.”
Martin laughed.
“Go on, then,” he said.
Frank sat down.
“Are you determined, Martin?” he asked.
“I think so. I don’t see what else I can do.”
“I asked you a question before dinner, which you didn’t have time to
answer. Is it as much to you as Chopin?”
“Why do you repeat that?” asked Martin. “It does not seem to me apt. How
can I make such a comparison?”
“Easily, I should have thought.”
Again Martin’s likeness to his father started to his face.
“You say, ‘easily,’” he said. “Take this, then. What would you do if in
order to get Helen you had to tell a real, mortal, mean lie, the sort of
lie that would make you blush in the dark?”
“It’s like that, is it?”
“Yes; just like that. I must. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know
whether I know, except as regards what I said in Lady Sunningdale’s
room, that, if in anything, in worship above all is beauty necessary.
That is true, but it is only a sort of symbol of what I feel. Other
people feel differently; they are less materialistic than I, and
ugliness doesn’t get in their way. But if you happen to be gifted or
cursed with the artistic temperament--Lord, how priggish that sounds!--I
don’t see how you can help demanding beauty in the service of what is
sublime.”
“I never knew you thought about these things,” said Frank, rather
lamely.
Martin snapped his fingers impatiently.
“More fool you, old chap,” said he. “All the same, I don’t see why you
should have. So I’ll apologise. Probably you thought that because one
has high spirits, a really fine capacity for playing the fool, and also
a certain leaning towards the piano, that I never took anything
seriously. Nor did I till lately. In any case, this is really so much
more my concern than anybody’s. I’ve got to lead my own life, not to be
dragged about like a sheep. And I must.”
He paused a moment.
“I have only given you an external instance of what seems to me an
underlying principle,” he said. “The difference in ‘form’ between the
two churches is an illustration of the desire of the Roman Church to
enlist beauty in the service of God. That desire is the spirit of
Romanism. Now, English people, take them all round, are extremely
deficient in the sense of beauty, and utterly blind to its importance.
And in church I think it really seems to them slightly inappropriate.
The Roman Church is mystical, romantic, poetical. The English is
Puritan and ugly and literal. And, do you know, as soon as I began to
think, I found I could not stand Puritanism. Heavens, how I have jawed!”
Martin got up briskly from his chair, with the unmistakable air of
closing that particular topic. In his youthful, boyish manner there
lurked a great deal of masterfulness, which those who came in contact
with it might be disposed to call obstinacy. Though he never adopted any
attitude so ungraceful as that of a donkey with its legs planted
outwards towards the four quarters of the compass, the effect on such as
pulled was about the same. If he chose, he would smilingly refuse to go
in any direction whatever, certainly until all efforts to move him were
relaxed. But as he knew himself, and as Frank suspected, there was just
one person in the world with whom, hitherto, he had never adopted this
attitude, and that was his father. Never yet in his life had he set his
will calmly in opposition to Mr. Challoner’s. As he had once told his
father, he was frightened at him, he feared his anger, but there was
certainly no one else in the world whom he would radically disagree
with, and yet obey. And some cold intimate knowledge of this had
suddenly struck him when at this moment he stopped the conversation. All
that he had said he had honestly felt, but vivid as was his imagination,
when he flashed a light into his father’s study at home, he could not
picture himself there saying this to him. His own figure wavered, as if
blown by a draught.
* * * * *
There are certain plants which apparently lie dormant, as far as outward
observation can go, for months, and even years, together, and then
suddenly grow with an incredible swiftness, putting forth leaf, bud,
and blossom with a rapidity that is almost uncanny. Some invisible
storage of force must certainly have been taking place during the
prolonged dormancy, the root-fibre has prospered and been accumulating
vitality out of the ken of human eye, transforming the fertile elements
into itself, and the visible result is the constellation of sudden
blossom. And a similar phenomenon is observable in that most obscure of
all growths, that of the human character. There are no clear causes to
be registered of this sudden activity, only the essence of the
conditions favourable to growth must have been stored within it, till
its reservoir has been filled to overflowing and discharges all at once
its potential energy. It struck Frank this evening that some such
inexplicable sprouting had just begun in Martin. He had quite suddenly
taken a distinct and defined line of his own, and was under the spell of
an irresistible, original impulse. He had never been, it is true, devoid
of vividness or vitality, but he had never yet taken a step. He had been
held by the scruff of his neck with his nose to the grindstone of
classical education without attempting to raise it, and his recent
emancipation had been entirely contrived by others, while he himself had
stirred not a finger in it, leaving Frank, his uncle, and Lady
Sunningdale to fight his battle for him, merely sitting in his tent and,
it is true, receiving the news of victory with engaging delight. But now
his character showed growth: he had thought for himself, come to a
conclusion consistent with himself, and was apparently prepared to act
on it.
And now that the growth had begun, it was not so hard to see the causes
which made it inevitable. For he was an artist through and through; in
all his tastes, in all his achievements the note of “form” sounded
trumpet-like. And if, which Frank had not known, the desire and the need
of God was in the woof of his nature, that, too, must be expressed with
the æsthetic beauty in which, necessarily to him, emotion had to be
clothed. He could be and was slovenly in execution where his artistic
sympathies were not aroused, as his more than mediocre performances in
classical languages could testify; but where his feelings were
concerned, any expression of them had to be made with all the excellence
obtainable. He was not able himself to do badly what appealed to him,
neither could he watch or take part in a thing that was badly done. And
the growth that he had made consisted in the fact that he recognised
this.