“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. What was 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——“