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 aboutequal 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 droppeda 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 placidtemperament. 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 ofthe 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 everseen, 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 itsbeaux 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 libraryof 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-lyinghorizon 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 chemicalexperiment, 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 andclutched 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.
Thebig 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 wasunder her chaperonage, sat next her. At the end of the fourthétudeof 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 teachthat?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 alienland. 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 definiteraison 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 conclusionof 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 nextHelen. 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 ofhuge, 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 anothertime, 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 notknow. 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 pleasantfrissonof 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 concerthope 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 briefrésuméof 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 therôleof 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 saythat 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: