The Challoners. E. F. Benson
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does, which, I expect, means nothing to your brother. Certainly also he has the sense of form in himself. My dear, he is an absolute Adonis, and as slim as asparagus, the English kind.”
Lord Flintshire laughed.
“And when do you expect this paragon?” he asked.
“After lunch. To let Martin go on learning Greek and curacies is like looking on at somebody being slowly murdered. Pray do as I tell you and get him away from that terrible parsonage. Why, the word is enough to upset an artist. It sounds so like parsnips.”
“I feel sure his father would never consent to let him run free in Paris,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because he has the insular distrust of Paris as a residence for the young.”
“My dear Flints,” she said, with some impatience, “if a young man is going to get into messes and make mudpies, he will make them anywhere. Surely it is the least desirable thing in the world that he should make them in the parsonage. Yes. You see your brother has so much character himself that he doesn’t seriously think that anybody else has got any.”
“I wish you would say these things to him,” said Lord Flintshire.
“I will, if I get an opportunity. But if not Paris, London, Rome, anywhere. Take poor Martin’s collar off, and let him roll in the grass. Yes, let us turn. Surely it is lunch-time. But do put up a pergola here all down the terrace and leave out the earwigs. My angels, we are going to our dinners.”
She turned, her very high heels clicking on the hard gravel of the terrace, and paused a moment.
“The mistake in principle which your fascinating brother is making,” she said, “lies in thinking that every one is cast in the same mould, which is his own, and has to be educated in the same manner. Whereas one of the few things of which we can be absolutely certain is that everybody is cast in different moulds. What fools people are really! Fancy trying to make a scholar or a parson of poor Martin! Such a waste, too, as well as an impossibility. Sunningdale might as well insist on my taking lessons in juggling or mathematics. Don’t you hate conjuring-tricks? What is the point of cutting open a loaf of bread and finding a globe of gold-fish inside it? Nobody in their senses could call me stupid, but I am morally incapable of adding up three figures correctly. Why? Simply because the process bores me, and I therefore do it wrong.”
“That is a fascinating theory of education for the young.”
“It may or may not be fascinating, but it is certainly true. The point of education is to develop any taste you may possess, not to bore you with the acquisition of knowledge. Ah, there is Stella Plympton coming to meet us. She has immense charm, and look at the way her head is set on her shoulders. Really, to have a neck is the only thing that matters. A girl with a neck has only to say ‘Good-morning’ for every one to exclaim, ‘How brilliant!’ Whereas people like me, with no neck, have to talk from morning till night at the tops of our voices, and wear ridiculous hats, or else every one says, ‘Poor dear, how much she has aged, and how very dull and heavy she is.’ Flints, I have immense trials. I often wonder how I keep up as I do, and am so frequently the life and soul of the party. Yes. Every one made in the same mould indeed! Stella and me, for instance. Flints, your brother is an imbecile. I don’t propose to learn Greek, because he can talk it in his sleep. Helen, too! Is she to be kept in that dreadful parsonage all her life, and see nobody but district visitors? I think we ought to take your brother’s family in hand. He neglects them shamefully; he ought to be prosecuted for criminal neglect. A man has a duty towards his children.”
Lord Flintshire laughed.
“And only last night I was telling Sidney that his sense of duty towards them was too strong.”
Again Lady Sunningdale’s attention rushed headlong away with the bit in its teeth; it was so rapid that one could not say it wandered.
“The last act of the ‘Götterdämmerung’!” she exclaimed. “My dear, they gave it superbly the other night; at Covent Garden, too, of all places—though the ravens did come in ten bars too soon, and Siegfried had to throw them away. I never slept for a week afterwards.”
The performance in question, therefore, must have taken place at least a week ago, for there was no manner of doubt that when Martin arrived, an hour or so after lunch, Lady Sunningdale was snatching a brief interval of much-needed repose after her sen’night vigil under the cedar on the lawn. The rest of the party, with the exception of Stella Plympton, had dispersed to spend the afternoon in what she considered the violent English fashion; that is to say, Frank Yorkshire and her brother had gone to play golf. Lord Flintshire had taken Lady Sunningdale’s daughter for a ride, and Lord Sunningdale himself, who had an insatiable mania for losing large sums of money in what he euphemistically called farming, had gone to feel horses’ legs and poke pigs in the back with the Scotch bailiff. Martin, in consequence, who had walked over the fields from the terrible parsonage and approached his uncle’s house from the garden side, found an idyll of placidity occupying the stage below the cedar, for a young woman of about his own age was sitting with an air of extreme content doing nothing whatever, and in a basket-chair close by was Lady Sunningdale, recuperating after the “Götterdämmerung.” Martin had formed a somewhat copious subject of conversation during lunch, and it required no particular exercise of ingenuity on Stella’s part to guess who the tall, straw-hatted figure was. From him again she looked at Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers, and glancing back to Martin raised her eyebrows, as if to ask what had better be done. Then she rose noiselessly from her chair, and beckoning to him with a little amused, friendly gesture, walked quietly away from the immediate neighbourhood.
“You must be Mr. Challoner,” she said, holding out her hand; “and Lady Sunningdale, apparently exhausted by the prospect of your arrival, is snatching a few moments of repose. What are we to do, then? Shall we wake her and risk her immediate displeasure, or let her sleep and risk her ultimate displeasure? We are quite certain to decide wrong.”
Much as Martin liked Lady Sunningdale, his instant and instinctive decision was not to wake her, for an enforced tête-à-tête with Stella had its obvious attractions. She was nearly as tall as he, and her dark-grey eyes almost on a level with his. Her face was a short oval, slightly and charmingly irregular in feature, the nose a little tip-tilted, the mouth a little full. This, set on the neck, which, according to Lady Sunningdale, could supply the place of intellectual brilliance, made a very good reason for risking the ultimate, not the immediate displeasure.
“My name is Stella Plympton, by the way,” the girl went on. “Pray excuse my introducing so stupid a topic. A person’s name matters so very little, does it not? But sometimes it is inconvenient not to know uninteresting things, like names, and the hours at which trains leave stations. Aren’t you thirsty after your walk? Will you not go and forage for fluids? And what are we to do?”
Martin looked at her with his direct lucid gaze.
“No fluid for me, thanks,” he said. “What do you advise? One can’t go and say ‘Hi, Lady Sunningdale.’”
Stella laughed.
“I couldn’t,” she said; “but I think you might, if you felt disposed. She adores you, you know.”
Martin laughed also, flushing slightly.
“I adore her,” he said. “She makes me laugh all the time. And I love laughing.”
“So do I,” she said. “So please go and say ‘Hi, Lady Sunningdale.’ I’m sure it would make me laugh. You won’t? Then a false and conventional code of politeness dictates that I should inflict my company on you, though you would probably rather be left alone. Anyhow, do not let us grill here in the sun like beefsteaks. There appears to be chairs in the shade over there. From there, too, we shall occupy a strategic position in which to observe Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers.”
There was a slightly sub-acid flavour about this of which Martin was just conscious. Stella, it seemed, was conscious of it too, for she explained: