The Challoners. E. F. Benson
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Helen,” said he. “I don’t think I can accept it from you.”
Helen got up.
“Oh, how I hate, how I hate——“ she began.
“That’s no use,” said Martin.
“Use? Of course not. Oh, it’s all very well for you. You are away half the year at Cambridge, and have no end of a time. But I am here. I and the Room!”
“What’s the ‘Room’?” asked her brother.
Helen pushed back her hair again and sat down on the lawn by Martin.
“The Room is the latest of my many trials,” she said. “It is quite new. Outside it is corrugated iron, inside it is distemper, covered by a dreadful sort of moisture, which is Essence of Village Children. On the walls there are maps of the Holy Land and Hampshire. I know the road from Dan even unto Beersheba as well as I know the road from here to Winchester. There is a library there of soiled books of travel and missionary enterprise, and a complete set of “Good Words.” There is also a wellspring there, only I can’t find it and stop it up, which continually pours up an odour of stuffiness. It is the sort of place where nothing nice could ever happen. And there on Tuesday evening I teach arithmetic to dreadful little boys. On Wednesday I read to mothers—I am getting to hate the word—who knit shapeless articles while I read. I read them abominable little stories about the respective powers of faith, hope, and love, and the virtue of being good, and the vice of being wicked. I don’t suppose any of them could be wicked if they tried.”
Helen paused a moment.
“Oh, Martin, it is heavenly to have you at home, and be able to say all these things straight out just once. It makes me feel so much better. May I go on?”
“Yes; take your time,” said Martin.
“Well, where had I got to? Oh, yes, Wednesday. On Thursday Mr. Wilkins—he’s the new curate, whom you haven’t seen yet: spectacles, bicycle, and proposes to me every now and then—Mr. Wilkins on Thursday has something for men only; I don’t know what, but I’m sure it’s dreadful. Friday—girls’ class. And on Saturday a choir practice. A—Choir—Practice. Now, you have been to church here——“
“Rather,” said Martin.
“And heard the singing. It is to produce that marvellous result that we practice. Even I know how awful it is. There was a man called the Reverend P. Henley. I sing the alto of his horrid chant. Would you like to hear me sing? And on Sunday I have the Sunday-school. They use heaps of pomatum, you know. And they learn by heart their duty towards their neighbours, and when I am not looking pull each other’s hair. Then it is Monday again, and we begin all over again. Oh, think of it! You see, I am not by nature a ministering angel, and I have to spend my whole life in ministering to these people. They have no intelligence, nothing that I can lay hold of or join hands with. It is not their fault, and it is not my fault that I am not a ministering angel. But what is the use of battering at their intelligences when they haven’t got any? Also they are personally distasteful to me.”
Martin laughed at this tirade, and thoughtfully executed a gnat that had designed to dine off his brown fingers.
“Why, I thought you were such a success,” he said. “Father held you up to me as an example and a shining light.”
“Of course I’m a success,” cried Helen. “I’ve got to do this sort of thing; and if one has to do something, it is simple imbecility not to do it well. You’re an imbecile, you know, darling.”
“Oh, I know that,” said he. “At least I’ve been told it often enough.”
Helen was silent a moment, looking very affectionately at her brother’s long, slim figure as he lay stretched on the grass by her side. His straw hat was tilted over his eyes, and of his face there appeared only his chin and his mouth a little open, shewing a very white line of teeth. And the current of her thoughts hardly changed when she went on to speak of him, not herself.
“Martin, how is it you can’t get through your examinations?” she asked. “You do work, don’t you? And though I called you an imbecile just now, you have more perception than most people. Or do you spend all your day at the piano?”
“He has forbidden me to have a piano in my rooms next term,” said Martin. “So I shall have to waste more time in walking to the pianos of other people and interrupting their work as well as my own.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” said Helen.
Martin only grunted in reply, and his sister went on:
“But it is foolish of you,” she said. “Indeed it is foolish. No doubt what you have got to do, Greek, Latin, is all very dull to you and seems very useless, but it is surely better to look at it as one of those things that has got to be done. As you say, and as father says, and as I say, I am a success at all these dreadful functions in the Room. Why? Merely because it has got to be done, and therefore, although it is all intensely stupid and bores me so much that I could cry, I attend sufficiently to do it respectably. Now, can’t you adopt the same attitude towards classics? Besides, you know what father feels about it.”
“I am perfectly aware of what father feels about it,” said Martin, dryly.
“Has he been at you again?”
“Yes, I think you might call it that without conveying a false impression. He apparently wants to give me to understand that it is some moral crime not to be able to do Greek iambics. Well, I am a criminal then. I can’t. Also that it is impossible to be educated without. Then I began arguing—which is always stupid—and said I supposed it depended on what one meant by education. And he said he imagined he was the best judge of that. So there we were.”
“And what do you mean by education?” asked Helen.
“Why, of course, the appreciation of beauty,” said Martin, quickly. “‘O world as God has made it,’—you know the lines.”
“Ah, say them,” she said.
Martin sat up, tilting back his hat.
“‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further may be sought for or declared?’”
“Yes, that isn’t a bad creed,” said Helen.
“I hope not, for it is mine. And it seems to me that you may look for beauty and find it in almost everything. Where you look for it should depend entirely on your tastes. Father finds it in the works of Demosthenes, but I in the works of Schumann and a few other people he has never heard of.”
“But aren’t Greek plays beautiful?” asked Helen.
“Oh, I daresay. But, being what I am, music concerns me more. Don’t let’s argue. It is so enfeebling. When I begin arguing I always feel like Mr. Tulliver, when he said, ‘It’s puzzling work, is talking.’”
Helen laughed.
“Well, you and I ought to be pretty well puzzled by now,” she said. “I’m sure we’ve talked enough. I’ll play you one-half game of croquet before dinner. Oh, by the way, father is dining with Uncle Rupert. You and Aunt Clara and I will be alone. You will have to read prayers.”
“And sing the hymn an octave below,” remarked Martin.
The Honorable and Reverend Sidney Challoner—or, as he preferred to be addressed, the Reverend-Honorable—was a man of method and economy who hated wasting anything from time down to the brown paper in which parcels arrived, and at this moment he was employing the half-hour before it was necessary to go to dress for dinner at Chartries, his brother’s place, which stood pleasantly among woods about a mile distant, in finishing his sermon for Trinity Sunday. His study, where he worked, was singularly like himself, and seemed as integral a part of him as the snail-shell is of the snail.