“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 itoff 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 Iamyours. 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.”
“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 itoff 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 Iamyours. 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.”
“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 thedesire 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 herfather 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 youafter 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,’”shesaid. “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. Someday 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 littlejoie-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’hárandA Reboursflew 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 isno 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 loudlyfor 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 allday?” 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 ofrolling 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 onlytwo 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. Whatwas 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 istoointeresting! 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 talkedabout 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 toMartin), 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 youwhy. 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 withan 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 sohard 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.
Karl Rusoffgot up rather wearily from the piano, where he had been practising for the last three hours, stretched himself, and for a few seconds held his fingers against his eyes, as if to rest them. The afternoon was a little chilly, and he walked over to the fireplace, where he stood warming his hands. The cheerful, flickering blaze shining through his thin, long hands made the fingers look transparent, as if they were luminous and lit with a red light from within.
From the windows the dun-coloured gloom of a cloudy spring afternoon in London left the room vague and full of shadows that huddled into the corners, while the light of gas-lamps, already lit in the street outside, cast patches of yellow illumination high on the walls and on the mouldings of the ceiling. The room itself was large, lofty, and well-proportioned, and furnished with a certain costly simplicity. A few Persian rugs lay on the parquetted floor, a French writing-table stood in the window, a tall bookcase glimmering with the gilt and morocco of fine bindings occupied nearly half of the wall in which the fireplace was set, two or three large chairs formed a group with a sofa in the corner, and the Steinway grand occupied more than the area taken up by all the rest of the furniture. There, perhaps, simplicity gained its highest triumph,—the case was of rosewood designed by Marris, and the formal perfection of its lines was a thing only to be perceived by an artist. On the walls, finally, hung twoor three prints, and on the mantelpiece were a couple of reproductions of Greek bronzes found at Herculaneum.
It was a room, in fact, that spoke very distinctly of an individual and flawless taste. Wherever the eye fell it lighted on something which, in its kind, was perfect; on the other hand, there was nothing the least startling or arresting, and, above all, nothing fidgetty. It was a room pre-eminently restful, where a tired mind might fall into reverie or an active mind pursue its activities without challenge or annoyance from visible objects. Pre-eminently also it was a room instinct with form; nothing there should have been otherwise.
Karl stood in front of the fireplace for some minutes, opening and shutting his hands, which were a little cramped, a little tired with the long practise they had just finished. His mind, too, was a little tired with the monotony of his work, for his three hours at the piano had been no glorious excursion into the sun-lit lands of melody, but the repetition of about twelve bars, all told, from a couple of passages out of the Waldstein Sonata which he was to play next week at the last of his four concerts in St. James’s Hall. And though perhaps not half a dozen people in that crowded hall would be able to tell the difference between the execution of those dozen bars as he played them yesterday and as he could play them now, he would not have been the pianist he was if it had been possible for him not to attempt to make them perfect, whether that took a week or a month. The need of perfection which never says “That will do” until the achievement cannot be bettered was a ruling instinct to him.
Besides, to him just now the presence of one out ofthose possible six auditors who might be able to tell the difference was more to him than all the rest of the ringing hall. Sometimes he almost wished he had never seen Martin,—never, at any rate, consented to give him lessons,—for in some strange way this pupil was becoming his master, and Rusoff was conscious that the lad’s personality, never so vivid as when he was at his music, was beginning to cast a sort of spell over his own. Brilliant, incisive, full of fire as his own style was, he was conscious when Martin played certain things that his own rendering, far more correct, far more finished though it might be, was elderly, even frigid, compared to the other. The glorious quality of his exuberant youth, a thing which in most artists is beginning to pale a little before they have attained to that level of technical skill which is necessary to a pianist of any claim to high excellence, was in Martin at its height and its noonday, while it really seemed sometimes to his master that he had been, perhaps in his cradle, perhaps as he bent his unwilling head over the crabbed intricacies of Demosthenes, somehow mysteriously initiated into the secrets of technique. Anyhow, that facility, that art of first mastering and then concealing difficulties which to most pianist only comes, as it had come to himself, through months and years of unremitting toil, seemed to be natural to his pupil. Martin had only got to be told what to do, and if he was in an obliging humour he did it. The difficulties of execution simply did not seem to exist for him. Immensely struck as Karl Rusoff had been with his performance last summer at Lord Yorkshire’s, he felt now that he had not then half fathomed the depth of his power, which lay pellucidlike a great ocean cave full of changing lights and shadows, suffused to its depths with sunlight, and by its very clearness and brightness baffling the eye that sought to estimate its depths.
And his temperament—that one thing that can never be taught. Karl Rusoff knew he had never come across a temperament that, artistically speaking, approached it. It was, indeed, not less than perfect from that point of view, sensitive, impressionable, divinely susceptible to beauty, hating (here largely was the personal charm of it to his master), hating the second-rate, especially the skilful second-rate, with glorious intensity. At the thought Karl’s rather grim face relaxed into a smile as he remembered how Martin had sat down to the piano the other day in a sudden burst of Handel-hatred and with his ten fingers, which sounded like twenty, and a strangely unmelodious voice, which sounded like a crow and ranged from high falsetto treble to the note of kettledrums, had given a rendering of the “Hail-Stone Chorus,” so ludicrous, yet catching so unerringly the cheap tumult of that toy-storm in a teacup, that he himself had sat and laughed till his eyes were dim.
“And why,” asked Martin, dramatically, in conclusion, “did that German spend his long and abandoned life in England? Because he knew, sir, he knew that in any other country he would have been kindly but firmly put over the border. Now shall I sing you the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’?”
Besides this facility in technique, the power of perception of beauty, which in many of the finest minds requires years of delicate cultivation before it becomes at all mature or certain, was already present in Martinin apparent fulness of growth; it was already an instinct exerting and asserting itself, not through habit, but through intuition. It was so much the dominating ingredient in the composition known as Martin Challoner that almost everything else might be considered as a mere by-product. His whole will, his whole energy, was at its service. When once it called to him, as it had called to him in his adoption of the Roman faith, it seemed he had to obey and could not question. It was to him a law that he could not transgress.
But all this, the charm of which Karl Rusoff felt almost too keenly for his peace of mind, he knew to be extremely dangerous, and to him this exultant, beautiful mind was entrusted with all the responsibility that it entailed, to fashion, to train, to prune. With a true and honest modesty he recognised how menial, so to speak, his work in regard to Martin was; but this did not lessen the responsibility. He was, to rate himself at the highest, the gardener who had to bring this exquisite plant into fulness of flower, to feed, to water, to cut, and, above all, to let air and sun, the great natural influences, have their way with it. He did not believe in forced growth or in sheltered cultivation; as he had told Martin in the summer, every emotion, every pain and joy, so long as it was not sensual, was his proper food. The richer his experience was, the richer would his music be. Karl had already seen a first clear endorsement of his view in the circumstances attending Martin’s secession to the Roman Church. He himself did not know with any exactitude of detail what had passed between him and his father, but though the painfulness of that had knocked Martin completely up for a time, what he himself hadforeseen had come true, and he could hardly help inwardly rejoicing at even the cruelty of Mr. Challoner’s attitude to his son, so great had been the gain to Martin artistically. He had suffered horribly, and was the better for it. Afterwards—the thing had taken place now more than two months ago—the elastic fibre of his youth had reasserted itself, and his exuberant health of body and mind had returned to their former vigour. The pain had passed, the gain remained.
Then to Karl’s reverie there came the interruption he had been expecting. A quick step sounded outside, then a noise as of a large quantity of books being dropped in the passage, a loud and hollow groan, and, after a short pause, Martin, with half a dozen volumes of music, entered, flushed, vivid in face, muddy in boots.
“I am late,” he said, “also I am sorry. But there was not a cab to be found. So I ran. I ran quicker than cabs. Oh, how hot I am!”
Karl’s face lighted up as he saw him. He himself was unmarried and rather lonely in the world till this child of his old age had come to him, who should be, so he told himself, the crown of his life’s work, and illuminate the dull world, long after he himself was dead, with the melodious torch that he had helped to light.
“Are you late?” he said. “I have only just finished practising myself. My dear child, how hot you are. Let us have tea first. And are you dining out to-night? If not, have a chop with me here, and we can work a little afterwards as well. You have not been to me for a week.”
“Yes, thanks, I should like that,” said Martin. “I have been down at Chartries, as you know, for a couple of days.”
He paused a moment, frowning at the fire.
“No; it was no good,” he said. “My father would not see me. He even opposed Helen’s coming to Uncle Rupert’s while I was there. But she came.”
“How is she?” asked Karl.
“Very well, and, what is so odd, extraordinarily happy,—happy in some steadily-shining way. Deep, broad, bright happiness, like sunlight. Now, how do you account for that? Away from Frank,—she doesn’t even write to him or hear from him,—continuing to do all that she found so intolerable under hugely aggravated conditions,—he not there,—and yet awfully happy. Not that father has changed to her at all,—he is very silent, very sad, very—well, sometimes very cross. And she feels his sadness, too,—feels it as if it were her own——“
“Ah, you have it,” said Karl; “that is why she is happy. It is what I have always told you—the fact of sympathy, whether it is with joy or pain, is what enriches and perfects; the fact of sympathy is what makes her happy. You are as happy—with the broad sunshine of happiness, even though a bitter wind whistles—when Isolde sinks lifeless by the body of Tristran as when Siegfried hears the singing of the bird.”
He paused a moment looking at the fire, then turned to Martin.
“Ah, my dear lad,” he said, “pray that you drink to the dregs any cup of sorrow or of joy that may be given you. Never shrink from pain—you will not become your best self without it. But by it andthrough it, and in no selfish or egoistic manner, you will fulfil yourself.”
He rose from his chair and turned on switch after switch of electric light.
“It is like this,” he said, feeling in his sudden desire for light some instinctive connection with what he was saying. “Open the doors, open the windows of your soul,—let the sun in and the wind. And this is a music-lesson,” he added, laughing. “Well I have given a good many in my life, and should be pleased to know I never gave a worse one. Now, what have you done since I saw you last?”
Martin walked quickly over to the piano with a laugh.
“Listen,” he said.
He played a few bars of very intricate phrase after the manner of the opening of a fugue. Then in the bass half the phrase was repeated, but it finished with something perfectly different, a third and a fourth or a fifth joined in, and before the “whole kennel was a-yelp” the original subject had passed through rapid gradations until it had become something totally different to what it began with, though still an incessant jabber of cognate phrases, never quite coherent, were somehow strung together and worked against each other by a miracle of ingenuity. Then the original subject was repeated with emphatic insistence, as if to call renewed attention to itself, but it was answered this time by a phrase that had nothing whatever to do with it; a third short melody totally different from anything that had gone before or was to come after ran its brief and ridiculous course, and then a perfect hodge-podge of reminiscences of all that had previouslyoccurred, handled with extraordinary dexterity, made the brain positively reel and swim. Finally a huge bravura passage, as much decked out with ribands and lace as a fashionable woman at a party, brought this insane composition, which taxed even Martin’s fingers, to a totally unexpected close.
Karl Rusoff had listened at first with sheer uncomprehending bewilderment, unable, since indeed there was neither head nor tail nor body to it, to make anything whatever out of it, and for a moment he wondered if Martin was merely playing the fool. But as he looked at his face bent over the piano, and saw even his fingers nearly in difficulties, a sudden light struck him, and he began to smile. And before the end was reached he sat shaking in his chair with hopeless laughter.
“Ah, you wicked boy,” he said, “why even our dear Lady Sunningdale would recognise herself.”
Martin pushed his plume out of his left eye and laughed.
“That’s the joy of it,” he said. “She did recognise it. About half way through she said, ‘Why, that’s me.’ You know you told me to do that,—to take anything, the east wind, or a London fog, or a friend, and make music of it.”
“Play it once more, if you will,” said Karl, “and then to work. Not that that is no work. There is a great deal of work in that. Also I perceive with secret satisfaction that you do not find it easy to play. But the bravura is rather unkind. She is never quite like that.”
“Ah, the bravura is only her clothes,” said Martin, preparing to begin again. “She even told me whichhat she had on. It is the one she describes as a covey of birds of paradise which have been out all night in a thunderstorm, sitting on a tomato-salad.”
Again Karl sat and listened to the torrent of fragments and currents of interrupted thoughts. Heard for the second time it seemed to him even a more brilliantly constructed absence of construction than before, an anomalous farrago which could only have been attained by a really scholarly and studious disregard of all rules; no one who had not the rules at his finger-tips could have broken them so accurately. It was a gorgeous parody of musical grammar in exactly the mode in which Lady Sunningdale’s conversation was a brilliant parody of speech, full of disconnected wit, and lit from end to end with humour, but as jerky as the antics of a monkey, as incapable of sustained flight in any one direction as a broken-winged bird, a glorious extravagance.
Karl had left his seat and stood near the piano as the bravura passage began. This time it seemed to present no difficulty to Martin, though his unerring hands were hardly more than a brown mist over the keys. And Karl felt a sudden spasm of jealousy of his pupil as a huge cascade of tenths and octaves streamed out of Martin’s fingers.
“Yes, indeed, the bravura is not easy,” he remarked, when Martin had finished, “and I think you played it without a mistake, did you not? Is itquiteeasy to play tenths like that?”
Martin laughed.
“I find I’ve got not to think of anything else,” he said. “Will that do for my composition for the week?”
Karl laughed.
“Yes, very well, indeed,” he said. “It has lots of humour,—and humour in music is rather rare. But don’t cultivate it, or some day you will find yourself in the position of a man who can’t help making puns. A dismal fate. Now, let us leave it—it is admirable—and get to work. I think I told you to study the last of the Noveletten. Play it, please.”
This time, however, there was no laughter and no approbation. Karl looked rather formidable.
“It won’t do,—it won’t do at all,” he said. “You have the notes, but that is absolutely all. It is perfectly empty and dead. A pianola would do as well. What’s the matter? Can’t you read anything into it?”
Martin shrugged his shoulders.
“I know it’s all wrong,” he said. “But I can’t make anything of it. It’s stodgy.”
Karl’s eyes glared rather dangerously from behind his glasses.
“Oh, stodgy, is it?” he said, slowly. “Schumann is stodgy. That is news to me. I must try to remember that.”
Martin looked sideways at his master, but Karl’s face did not relax.
“Stodgy!” he repeated. “I know where the stodginess comes in. Ah, you are either idiotic or you have taken no trouble about it. Because you have found that the mere execution was not difficult to you, you have not troubled to get at the music. I gave you music to learn, and you have brought me back notes. Do not bring a piece to me like that again. If I give you a thing to learn, I do so for some reason. Get up, please.”
Karl paused a moment, summoning to his aid all that he knew, all he had ever learned to give cunning to his fingers and perception to his brain. Never perhaps in his life had he played with more fire, with more eagerness to put into the music all that was his to put there, and that in order to charm no crowded hall packed from floor to ceiling, but to show just one pupil the difference between playing the music and playing the notes.
Martin had left the music-stool in what may be called dignified silence and was standing by the fire; but before long Karl saw him out of the corner of an eye (he could spare him neither thought nor look) steal back towards the piano, and though he could not look directly at his face, he knew what was there,—those wide-open, black eyes, finely-chiselled nostrils, swelling and sinking with his quickened breath, mouth a little open, and the whole vivid brain that informed the face lost, absorbed.
He came to the end and sat silent.
“Is that there?” asked Martin, in a half-breathless whisper. “Is that really all there?”
Karl looked up. Martin’s face was exactly as he had known it would be. But the first mood of the artist was of humility.
“I played wrong notes,” he said. “Half a dozen at least.”
“Oh, more than that,” said Martin. “But what does that matter? You played it. My God, what a fool I have been! There I sat, day after day, and never saw the music.”
Karl Rusoff got up. It had been a very good music-lesson.
“It isn’t ‘stodgy,’”he said. “It isn’t, really. Do you now see one thing out of a hundred perhaps that it means? You have got to be the critic of the music you play,—you have to interpret it. But out of all the ways of playing that, out of all that can be seen in it, you saw nothing, your rendering was absolutely without meaning or colour. To play needs all you are; you gave that fingers only. If I want you to practise fingers only, I will tell you so, and give you a finger exercise or Diabelli. Otherwise you may take it for granted that when your fingers are perfect your work begins. But to play—ah—you have to burn before you play.”
Martin still hung over the piano.
“And I thought it stodgy,” he repeated, looking shy and sideways at Karl’s great grey head.
“Well, you won’t again,” said he. “Will you try it again now?”
“No; how can I?” said Martin. “I’ve got to begin it all over again.”
“Then there was a piece of Bach. Play that. And now read nothing into it except the simplicity of a child. Just the notes,—the more simply the better. Wait a moment, Martin. I want to enjoy it. Let me sit down.”
Martin waited, and then began one of the Suites Anglaises, and like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room, or like a cloudless dawn with the singing of birds after a night of storm and thunder, the exquisite melody flowed from his fingers, precise, youthful, and joyous. There was no introspection here, no moods of a troubled soul, no doubts or questioning; it sang as a thrush sings, changed and returned on itself,danced in a gavotte, moved slowly in a minuet, and romped through a Bourrée like a child.
At the end Martin laughed suddenly.
“Oh, how good!” he cried. “Did you know that Bach wrote that for me?” he asked, turning to Karl.
“Yes, I thought he must have,” said Karl. “And with the command that you were to play it to me. You played that very well; all your fingers were of one weight. How did you learn that?”
Martin raised his eyebrows.
“Why, it would spoil it, would it not, to play it any other way?” he asked.
“Certainly it would.”
Then he got up quickly.
“Oh, Martin, you child,” he said. “Did I speak to you roughly about the Schumann?”
“You did rather,” he said. “But I deserved to have my ears boxed.”
The two dined alone, and held heated arguments, not like master and pupil, but like two students who worked side by side, Karl as often as not deferring to the other, Martin as often as not blandly disagreeing with Karl.
“How can you pronounce, for instance,” he asked, “that that Novelette is to be played with those sweatings and groanings, the mere notes being of no use, whereas Bach is to be played with notes only?”
Karl gazed at him in silence.
“You impertinent infant,” he said. “What else do you propose? To play the Schumann as you played it? And the Bach as I played the Schumann?”
“That would sound extremely funny,” remarked Martin. “No, I don’t say you are not right; but how do you know you are right?”
“Because Bach wrote for the spinet,” said Karl. “Have you ever tried to play Schumann on a spinet? It sounds exactly as you made it sound just now. A deplorable performance, my poor boy.”
“You have told me that. Don’t rub it in so. I shall play it very well to-morrow.”
“Or next year,” said Karl, still grim, but inwardly full of laughter. “By the way, there was no ‘dog’ motive in the Lady Sunningdale composition.”
“You can’t have been attending,” said Martin. “Suez Canal came in twice, and Sahara three times, with shrill barks. Yes, please, another cutlet.”
Karl watched him eat it. The process took about five seconds.
“You didn’t taste that,” he remarked.
“No; it was needed elsewhere,” said Martin. “But I’m sure it was very good.”
Karl lingered over the bouquet of his Burgundy.
“It is a strange thing,” he said, “that mankind are so gross as to confuse the sense of taste with greediness. No, my dear boy, I am not at this moment attacking you. But there is no organ, even that of the ear, in this wonderful body of ours so fine as that of taste. Yet to most people the sight of a man deeply appreciating his dinner conveys a feeling of greediness. But I always respect such a man. He has a sense more than most people.”
“But isn’t it greedy?” asked Martin.
Karl became deeply impressive.“It is no more greedy,” he said, “to catch the flavour of an olive or an oyster than to catch the tone of a ’cello.”
“Ah, that would be like encoring a song in an opera—a most detestable habit—and hearing it over and over again. No artist desires that. Fancy hearing Wotan’s Abschied twice. That would be greedy. The art of dining, like most arts, is frightfully neglected in England.”
Martin laughed.
“I have been here, I suppose, a dozen times,” he said, “and every time you give me some surprise. I had no idea you gave two thoughts as to what you ate.”
“That was hasty of you. True, of all the senses, I put the ear first. That is personal predilection. But all the senses really are equal; there is no shadow of reason for supposing that one is more elevated than another. True, some can be more easily misused than others, taste more particularly. But all are subtle gateways to the soul.”
They had finished dinner and Karl pushed back his chair.
“Take an instance,” he said. “Take incense. Does not that smell excite and inspire the devotional sense? Does not the smell of frangipanni—an unendurable odour—suggest a sort of hot-house sensualism? Does not the smell of a frosty November morning bring the sense of cleanness into the very marrow of your bones?”
Martin sniffed experimentally.
“Ah, I know that,” he said. “And the leaves on the beech-trees are red, and the grass underfoot a little crisp with frost. Oh, how good! But what then?”
Karl was watching him closely. It was his conscious object now and always to make Martin think, to excite anything in him that could touch his sense for beauty. He had found that this half-serious, half-flippant method was the easiest means of approach,—for Martin was but a boy. Discussions in an earnest, conscious German spirit both bored and alarmed him. This fact, had his father grasped it, might in years past have helped matters.
“Why, everything,” he replied. “Each sense can be expressed in terms of another. Take magenta in colour,—it is frangipanni in smell; in sound it is—what shall we say?—an Anglican chant of some sort; in taste it is the vague brown sauce in which a bad cook hides his horrors.”
Martin laughed again, with the keen pleasure of youth in all things experimental.
“Yes, that is true,” he said. “How do you go on? Take a fine colour,—vermilion.”
“The blind man said it must be like the sound of a trumpet,” said Karl; “and the blind man at that moment saw. Brandy also for taste is red. So is ammonia,—a pistol to your nostrils.”
Martin dabbed his cigarette on to his dessert plate.
“Yes, yes,” he cried, “and C major is red. And F sharp is blue,—electric blue, like the grotto at Capri——“