The Challoners

by E. F. Benson

Her eye brightened.

“I don’t know if you know or not,” she said, “but I expect you do. Is Martin really all that,—dear, stupid, old Martin?”

“I believe so. We are going to get him to London to find out. You will give him my message, won’t you? I go up to town to-day, and he may come any day he likes; the sooner the better. Lady Sunningdale is writing to you.”

“Oh, it would be heavenly!” said she.

He took his leave soon after, and went back to Chartries for an early lunch, since Lady Sunningdale, who never started anywhere in the morning, unless it was impossible to get there otherwise, had retained his services in order to minimize the dangers and difficulties incident to travel by rail with Suez Canal and Sahara. For Sahara had an unreasoning dislike of locomotive engines, which had never, at present, hurt her, and always tried to bite them, while Suez Canal, whenever it was feasible, jumped down between the platform and the train and smelled about for whatever there might be of interest among the wheels of the carriages. In addition to these excitements, their mistress never moved without a tea-basket, a collapsible card-table,—which usually collapsed,—a small library of light literature, a jewel-case, so that the tedium of a journey in her company was reduced to a minimum, since when the train was in motion these recreations could be indulged in, and when it stopped there was more than enough to be done in collecting these priceless impedimenta to prevent any companion of hers from feeling a moment’s boredom that arose from idleness.

She also could hardly ever produce either her own or the dogs’ railway tickets when called upon to do so, thus giving use to games of hide-and-seek all over the carriage.

And to-day, in addition, Frank had something very considerable of his own to think about, something that made him very alert, yet very inattentive, that brightened his eye, yet prevented him seeing anything. And he could almost swear that the odour of sweet-peas pervaded the railway carriage.

Martin, mean time, was spending the morning on the banks of the stream which had given him those good moments early the day before. But to-day the sun was very hot and bright, and after an hour’s fruitless, but patient, attempts on the subaqueous lives, he abandoned the vain activity of the arm, and with the vague intention of returning home and getting through some Æschylus before fishing again towards evening, sat down to smoke a cigarette in the fictitious coolness, bred by the sound of running water, preparatory to trudging back across the baked fields. Tall grasses mixed with meadow-sweet and ragged-robin moved gently in the little breeze that stirred languidly in the air, but the sky was utterly bare of clouds and stretched a translucent dome of sapphire from the low-lying horizon of the water-meadows on the one hand up to the high yellowing line of the downs on the other. At his feet flowed the beautiful stream, twining ropes of shifting crystal as it hurried on its stainless journey over beds of topaz-coloured gravel or chalk that gleamed with the lustre of pears beneath the surface. Strands and patches of weed waved in the suck of the water, struck by the sun into tawny brightness, shot here and there with incredible emerald, and tall brown-flowering rushes twitched and nodded in the stress of the current. Suspended larks carolled invisible against the brightness of the sky, swallows skimmed and swooped, and soon a moorhen, rendered bold by Martin’s immobility, half splashed, half swam across the stream just in front of him. And he thought no more of the fish he had not caught, but sat with hands clasped round his knees, and, without knowing it, drank deep of the ineffable beauty that was poured out around him on meadow and stream and sky. Every detail, too, was as exquisite as the whole: the yellow flags that stood ankle-deep in the edge of the river were each a miracle of design; the blue butterflies that hovered and poised on the meadow-sweet were more gorgeous with the azure of their wings and white and black border than a casket of lapis-lazuli set with silver and shod with ebony.

By degrees as he sat there, his cigarette smoked out, but with no thought of moving or of Æschylus, the vague and fluid currents of his mind that for years had coursed through his consciousness, though he himself had scarcely been conscious of them, began for the first time to crystallize into something illuminating and definite. Like some supersaturated solution of chemical experiment, his mind, long crying out for and demanding beauty, needed but one more grain of desire to render its creed solid, and to himself now for the first time came the revelation of himself, and like a spectator at some enthralling drama, he watched himself, learning what he was, without comment either of applause or disgust, but merely fascinated by the fact of this new possession, his own individuality, and, even as Frank had said to Helen only yesterday, his own inalienable right to it. It was none other’s but his alone. There was nothing in the world the same as it, since every human being is a unique specimen, and, bad or good, it was his own clay, his own material, out of which his will, like some sculptor’s tool should fashion a figure of some kind. And everything he saw, the yellow iris, the blue butterfly, the water-weeds, were in their kind perfect. Their natural growth, unstunted by restraint or attempt to control them into something else, had brought them to that perfection; and was it conceivable in any thinkable scheme of things that man, the highest and infinitely most marvellous work of nature, should not be capable of rising, individual by individual, to some corresponding perfection? Soil, sun, environment were necessary; the flags would not grow in the desert, the lark would not soar nor carol in captivity, but given the freedom, the care, or the cultivation which each required, every living and growing thing had within itself the perfection possible to itself.

Up to this point his thought had been as intangible as a rainbow, though like a rainbow of definite shape and luminous colour, and showed itself only in a brightened, unseeing eye, and in fingers that twitched and clutched till the nails were white with pressure round his flannelled knee. Then suddenly the crystallization came, ungrammatical, but convincing.