is no good in my stopping here; I don’t suppose this sort of thing gives you any pleasure. Uncle Rupert, I am sure, would let me go and stay with him in London next week till the Long Term begins at Cambridge. That will be in another fortnight. You told me you wished me to be up there all the time. So would it not be much better if I went away?”
His father did not reply at once, but sat fingering his writing things with rather tremulous hands.
“Are you not happy at home?” he asked at length.
“No,” said Martin, shortly.
The brevity and certainty of this struck more deeply yet. If Martin a few months before had felt sick at his father’s anger, the latter was certainly the more to be pitied now.
“Martin, what is the matter between us?” he said.
“I don’t know; but it’s the same as it has always been, only it’s rather worse. I can’t please you, I suppose, and you are always down on me for something. It is to be hoped it is doing some good, because otherwise it seems—well, rather unnecessarily unpleasant. First it was my work, then what I said to Helen, then ‘The Mill on the Floss,’ and now this. To-morrow it will be something else. There is sure to be something. I daresay I don’t understand you, and I know you don’t understand me. This afternoon, for instance. Oh, it’s no use trying to explain,” he said.
“It may be the utmost use. It may make the greatest difference. I only wish that you had said to me years ago what you are saying now. I have tried to be a good father to you, but sometimes, often, I have been puzzled as to what to do. You don’t confide in me, you don’t tell me your joys and pleasures, and let me share them. I often hear you laughing when I am not with you. But when I am, not so often.”
Martin half shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “There we are again.”
“That is quite true,” he said. “But what can I do when music, which to me is the greatest joy and pleasure in life, seems to you just a waste of time. You have often told me so. You don’t know one bit what it means to me; and as it seems to you a waste of time, how can I confide in you about a thing you don’t really approve of and of which, you will pardon me, you are absolutely ignorant? In the middle of the Brahms, or whatever it was, you come in and interrupt by saying that I am wasting my time, as usual. I might as well come in in the middle of prayers and say you were wasting—there I go again. I am sorry. That will show you how hopeless it all is.”
Mr. Challoner was silent a moment, really too much pained to speak. But he was wise enough to recognise that to say anything just then would be to effectually stop the only confidence that Martin had reposed in him for years.
“Well, Martin,” he said, after a moment.
“Ah, it’s no use,” he said. “Even at the very instant when I am consciously trying to be careful, I say something like that, and you are shocked at it. But I meant it: it exactly expressed what I meant. Music is to me like that. You never thought that possible. All these years you have been thinking that I was very fond of music—just that—and wasted a great deal of time at the piano. Whereas it seems to me that I am wasting time when I am reading ‘Thucydides.’”
“That is what Lady Sunningdale said. She talked to me about it after you went away. You know her well, do you not?”
“Yes; she has been tremendously kind to me.”
His father rose.
“You must go now, dear lad,” he said. “I have got some work to do before to-morrow. And let us try, both of us, to find more of a friend in each other. I shall never have another son, and you will never have another father. It would be very sad, would it not, if we did not, each of us, make the best of that relation?”
There came into his beautiful brown eyes the shadow of tears, and Martin wondered.
“I will try, father,” he said.
Mr. Challoner did not at once begin the work which he wished to finish before bedtime when Martin left him, but sat with his head resting on his hand, thinking very deeply. He was much troubled and perplexed, and his future line of action, usually so clear to him, so precisely indicated by his sense of duty, and, to do him justice, so undeviatingly followed, was now very misty and ill defined. Hitherto he had never entertained any serious doubts that he was not doing the best possible for Martin, both in always correcting and admonishing when he seemed to be idle, even in trifles where some small carelessness on his part indicated the danger of his falling into slack or slovenly habits, and in his convictions that school and college education in classical subjects was the best possible method of training and developing his mind. He did not in the least even now, with regard to the latter, think it certain that he was mistaken, but it had been brought home to him very clearly in the last twenty-four hours that other people thought he was. For his brother’s opinion he always felt a considerable respect, but for Lady Sunningdale’s, though he wondered at it, he could not help feeling more. A dozen times yesterday at dinner, a dozen times more this afternoon, he had asked himself how the observations of a woman who really appeared to be scarcely capable of consecutive orderly thought could be worth consideration, but as often some plump grain of solid sense, showing acuteness and perception amid the husks and chaff, answered the question. He himself was conscious of not being quite at his ease with her, but he could not help admiring her intense vitality, her speed, her busy, acute inquisitiveness. And it was she who hailed Martin, poor, desultory, idle Martin, as a genius.
Suppose he took their advice and let his son go free into that world of which he himself knew so little, of which, however, he had so abundant a mistrust, how dangerous and hazardous an experiment! Martin, with his slackness, his ineradicable tendency to what was easy and pleasant; Martin, above all, with this apparently so great musical gift, unsuspected by his father, but adored by others, was exactly the sort of boy to be petted, spoiled, ruined by the careless, highly-coloured butterflies which Mr. Challoner believed to dance there all day in the sun. To them music, painting, drama, the visible arts, were ends in themselves, the object being enjoyment, while to him such a doctrine savoured almost of profanity. To him painting, sculpture, music, were recreations which might at intervals be innocently allowed to the earnest worker, but even in such times of refreshment the Christian would look for something more, and find in beauty that which should lead his thoughts to the Fountain and Creator of it. Such, however, was not the view, as he was aware, of the world of Art into which he was invited to let Martin plunge; to them music was sweet sound and led the soul nowhere but to music; painting was line and colour; sculpture was form, and the end and fulfilment and consummation of it was perfection of form and the appreciation thereof. About this latter branch of art he had never been able to come to a definite conclusion. Certainly studies in the nude seemed to him to be things dangerous, if not inherently sensual.
“All Art is perfectly useless.” He remembered having read that sentence in some book of Martin’s which he had found lying about. A rapid glance at it on that occasion had justified its confiscation and a few words to Martin on the subject. But that sentence occurred to him again now, for there in half a line was expressed tritely and unmistakeably the exact opposite of what he held to be the truth. All Art, he would have said himself, that does not—apart from the natural and innocent enjoyment of it—raise and elevate the soul, is not art at all. As a corollary, the highest form of painting in his eyes was religious painting, because it led by a direct road to its goal, the highest form of music, religious music. These two were wholly laudable; Raphael, so to speak, shook hands with missionaries, and Handel took Luther’s arm. But at the other end of the line of artists came those who, however consummate was their art, treated of themes which in themselves were dangerous, or, worst of all, who by clothing sin in melodious and beautiful garb rendered
