The Challoners

by E. F. Benson

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 with an 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 so hard 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.

CHAPTER X

Karl Rusoff got 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 two or 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 of those 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 pellucid like 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’?”