MICHAEL
by E. F. Benson
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Though there was nothing visibly graceful about Michael Comber, he apparently had the art of giving gracefully. He had already told his cousin Francis, who sat on the arm of the sofa by his table, that there was no earthly excuse for his having run into debt; but now when the moment came for giving, he wrote the cheque quickly and eagerly, as if thoroughly enjoying it, and passed it over to him with a smile that was extraordinarily pleasant.
“There you are, then, Francis,” he said; “and I take it from you that that will put you perfectly square again. You’ve got to write to me, remember, in two days’ time, saying that you have paid those bills. And for the rest, I’m delighted that you told me about it. In fact, I should have been rather hurt if you hadn’t.”
Francis apparently had the art of accepting gracefully, which is more difficult than the feat which Michael had so successfully accomplished.
“Mike, you’re a brick,” he said. “But then you always are a brick. Thanks awfully.”
Michael got up, and shuffled rather than walked across the room to the bell by the fireplace. As long as he was sitting down his big arms and broad shoulders gave the impression of strength, and you would have expected to find when he got up that he was tall and largely made. But when he rose the extreme shortness of his legs manifested itself, and he appeared almost deformed. His hands hung nearly to his knees; he was heavy, short, lumpish.
“But it’s more blessed to give than to receive, Francis,” he said. “I have the best of you there.”
“Well, it’s pretty blessed to receive when you are in a tight place, as I was,” he said, laughing. “And I am so grateful.”
“Yes, I know you are. And it’s that which makes me feel rather cheap, because I don’t miss what I’ve given you. But that’s distinctly not a reason for your doing it again. You’ll have tea, won’t you?”
“Why, yes,” said Francis, getting up, also, and leaning his elbow on the chimney-piece, which was nearly on a level with the top of Michael’s head. And if Michael had gracefulness only in the art of giving, Francis’s gracefulness in receiving was clearly of a piece with the rest of him. He was tall, slim and alert, with the quick, soft movements of some wild animal. His face, brown with sunburn and pink with brisk-going blood, was exceedingly handsome in a boyish and almost effeminate manner, and though he was only eighteen months younger than his cousin, he looked as if nine or ten years might have divided their ages.
“But you are a brick, Mike,” he said again, laying his long, brown hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “I can’t help saying it twice.”
“Twice more than was necessary,” said Michael, finally dismissing the subject.
The room where they sat was in Michael’s flat in Half Moon Street, and high up in one of those tall, discreet-looking houses. The windows were wide open on this hot July afternoon, and the bourdon hum of London, where Piccadilly poured by at the street end, came in blended and blunted by distance, but with the suggestion of heat, of movement, of hurrying affairs. The room was very empty of furniture; there was a rug or two on the parquet floor, a long, low bookcase taking up the end near the door, a table, a sofa, three or four chairs, and a piano. Everything was plain, but equally obviously everything was expensive, and the general impression given was that the owner had no desire to be surrounded by things he did not want, but insisted on the superlative quality of the things he did. The rugs, for instance, happened to be of silk, the bookcase happened to be Hepplewhite, the piano bore the most eminent of makers’ names. There were three mezzotints on the walls, a dragon’s-blood vase on the high, carved chimney-piece; the whole bore the unmistakable stamp of a fine, individual taste.
“But there’s something else I want to talk to you about, Francis,” said Michael, as presently afterwards they sat over their tea. “I can’t say that I exactly want your advice, but I should like your opinion. I’ve done something, in fact, without asking anybody, but now that it’s done I should like to know what you think about it.”
Francis laughed.
“That’s you all over, Michael,” he said. “You always do a thing first, if you really mean to do it—which I suppose is moral courage—and then you go anxiously round afterwards to see if other people approve, which I am afraid looks like moral cowardice. I go on a different plan altogether. I ascertain the opinion of so many people before I do anything that I end by forgetting what I wanted to do. At least, that seems a reasonable explanation for the fact that I so seldom do anything.”
Michael looked affectionately at the handsome boy who lounged long-legged in the chair opposite him. Like many very shy persons, he had one friend with whom he was completely unreserved, and that was this cousin of his, for whose charm and insouciant brilliance he had so adoring an admiration.
He pointed a broad, big finger at him.
“Yes, but when you are like that,” he said, “you can just float along. Other people float you. But I should sink heavily if I did nothing. I’ve got to swim all the time.”
“Well, you are in the army,” said Francis. “That’s as much swimming as anyone expects of a fellow who has expectations. In fact, it’s I who have to swim all the time, if you come to think of it. You are somebody; I’m not!”
Michael sat up and took a cigarette.
“But I’m not in the army any longer,” he said. “That’s just what I am wanting to tell you.”
Francis laughed.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “Have you been cashiered or shot or something?”
“I mean that I wrote and resigned my commission yesterday,” said Michael. “If you had dined with me last night—as, by the way, you promised to do—I should have told you then.”
Francis got up and leaned against the chimney-piece. He was conscious of not thinking this abrupt news as important as he felt he ought to think it. That was characteristic of him; he floated, as Michael had lately told him, finding the world an extremely pleasant place, full of warm currents that took you gently forward without entailing the slightest exertion. But Michael’s grave and expectant face—that Michael who had been so eagerly kind about meeting his debts for him—warned him that, however gossamer-like his own emotions were, he must attempt to ballast himself over this.
“Are you speaking seriously?” he asked.
“Quite seriously. I never did anything that was so serious.”
“And that is what you want my opinion about?” he asked. “If so, you must tell me more, Mike. I can’t have an opinion unless you give me the reasons why you did it. The thing itself—well, the thing itself doesn’t seem to matter so immensely. The significance of it is why you did it.”
Michael’s big, heavy-browed face lightened a moment. “For a fellow who never thinks,” he said, “you think uncommonly well. But the reasons are obvious enough. You can guess sufficient reasons to account for it.”
“Let’s hear them anyhow,” said Francis.
Michael clouded again.
“Surely they are obvious,” he said. “No one knows better than me, unless it is you, that I’m not like the rest of you. My mind isn’t the build of a guardsman’s mind, any more than my unfortunate body is. Half our work, as you know quite well, consists in being pleasant and in liking it. Well, I’m not pleasant. I’m not breezy and cordial. I can’t do it. I make a task of what is a pastime to all of you, and I only shuffle through my task. I’m not popular, I’m not liked. It’s no earthly use saying I am. I don’t like the life; it seems to me senseless. And those who live it don’t like me. They think me heavy—just heavy. And I have enough sensitiveness to know it.”
Michael need not have stated his reasons, for his cousin could certainly have guessed them; he could, too, have confessed to the truth of them. Michael had not the light hand, which is so necessary when young men work together in a companionship of which the cordiality is an essential part of the work; neither had he in the social side of life that particular and inimitable sort of easy self-confidence which, as he had said just now, enables its owner to float. Except in years he was not young; he could not manage to be “clubable”; he was serious and awkward at a supper party; he was altogether without the effervescence which is necessary in order to avoid flatness. He did his work also in the same conscientious but leaden way; officers and men alike felt it. All this Francis knew perfectly well; but instead of acknowledging it, he tried quite fruitlessly to smooth it over.
“Aren’t you exaggerating?” he asked.
Michael shook his head.
“Oh, don’t tone it down, Francis!” he said. “Even if I was exaggerating—which I don’t for a moment admit—the effect on my general efficiency would be the same. I think what I say is true.”
Francis became more practical.
“But you’ve only been in the regiment three years,” he said. “It won’t be very popular resigning after only three years.”
“I have nothing much to lose on the score of popularity,” remarked Michael.
There was nothing pertinent that could be consoling here.
“And have you told your father?” asked Francis. “Does Uncle Robert know?”
“Yes; I wrote to father this morning, and I’m going down to Ashbridge to-morrow. I shall be very sorry if he disapproves.”
“Then you’ll be sorry,” said Francis.
“I know, but it won’t make any difference to my action. After all, I’m twenty-five; if I can’t begin to manage my life now, you may be sure I never shall. But I know I’m right. I would bet on my infallibility. At present I’ve only told you half my reasons for resigning, and already you agree with me.”
Francis did not contradict this.
“Let’s hear the rest, then,” he said.
“You shall. The rest is far more important, and rather resembles a sermon.”
Francis appropriately sat down again.
“Well, it’s this,” said Michael. “I’m twenty-five, and it is time that I began trying to be what perhaps I may be able to be, instead of not trying very much—because it’s hopeless—to be what I can’t be. I’m going to study music. I believe that I could perhaps do something there, and in any case I love it more than anything else. And if you love a thing, you have certainly a better chance of succeeding in it than in something that you don’t love at all. I was stuck into the army for no reason except that soldiering is among the few employments which it is considered proper for fellows in my position—good Lord! how awful it sounds!—proper for me to adopt. The other things that were open were that I should be a sailor or a member of Parliament. But the soldier was what father chose. I looked round the picture gallery at home the other day; there are twelve Lord Ashbridges in uniform. So, as I shall be Lord Ashbridge when father dies, I was stuck into uniform too, to be the ill-starred thirteenth. But what has it all come to? If you think of it, when did the majority of them wear their smart uniforms? Chiefly when they went on peaceful parades or to court balls, or to the Sir Joshua Reynolds of the period to be painted. They’ve been tin soldiers, Francis! You’re a tin soldier, and I’ve just ceased to be a tin soldier. If there was the smallest chance of being useful in the army, by which I mean standing up and being shot at because I am English, I would not dream of throwing it up. But there’s no such chance.”
Michael paused a moment in his sermon, and beat out the ashes from his pipe against the grate.
“Anyhow the chance is too remote,” he said. “All the nations with armies and navies are too much afraid of each other to do more than growl. Also I happen to want to do something different with my life, and you can’t do anything unless you believe in what you are doing. I want to leave behind me something more than the portrait of a tin soldier in the dining-room at Ashbridge. After all, isn’t an artistic profession the greatest there is? For what counts, what is of value in the world to-day? Greek statues, the Italian pictures, the symphonies of Beethoven, the plays of Shakespeare. The people who have made beautiful things are they who are the benefactors of mankind. At least, so the people who love beautiful things think.”
Francis glanced at his cousin. He knew this interesting vital side of Michael; he was aware, too, that had anybody except himself been in the room, Michael could not have shown it. Perhaps there might be people to whom he could show it but certainly they were not those among whom Michael’s life was passed.
“Go on,” he said encouragingly. “You’re ripping, Mike.”
“Well, the nuisance of it is that the things I am ripping about appear to father to be a sort of indoor game. It’s all right to play the piano, if it’s too wet to play golf. You can amuse yourself with painting if there aren’t any pheasants to shoot. In fact, he will think that my wanting to become a musician is much the same thing as if I wanted to become a billiard-marker. And if he and I talked about it till we were a hundred years old, he could never possibly appreciate my point of view.”
Michael got up and began walking up and down the room with his slow, ponderous movement.
“Francis, it’s a thousand pities that you and I can’t change places,” he said. “You are exactly the son father would like to have, and I should so much prefer being his nephew. However, you come next; that’s one comfort.”
He paused a moment.
“You see, the fact is that he doesn’t like me,” he said. “He has no sympathy whatever with my tastes, nor with what I am. I’m an awful trial to him, and I don’t see how to help it. It’s pure waste of time, my going on in the Guards. I do it badly, and I hate it. Now, you’re made for it; you’re that sort, and that sort is my father’s sort. But I’m not; no one knows that better than myself. Then there’s the question of marriage, too.”
Michael gave a mirthless laugh.
“I’m twenty-five, you see,” he said, “and it’s the family custom for the eldest son to marry at twenty-five, just as he’s baptised when he’s a certain number of weeks old, and confirmed when he is fifteen. It’s part of the family plan, and the Medes and Persians aren’t in it when the family plan is in question. Then, again, the lucky young woman has to be suitable; that is to say, she must be what my father calls ‘one of us.’ How I loathe that phrase! So my mother has a list of the suitable, and they come down to Ashbridge in gloomy succession, and she and I are sent out to play golf together or go on the river. And when, to our unutterable relief, that is over, we hurry back to the house, and I escape to my piano, and she goes and flirts with you, if you are there. Don’t deny it. And then another one comes, and she is drearier than the last—at least, I am.”
Francis lay back and laughed at this dismal picture of the rejection of the fittest.
“But you’re so confoundedly hard to please, Mike,” he said. “There was an awfully nice girl down at Ashbridge at Easter when I was there, who was simply pining to take you. I’ve forgotten her name.”
Michael clicked his fingers in a summary manner.
“There you are!” he said. “You and she flirted all the time, and three months afterwards you don’t even remember her name. If you had only been me, you would have married her. As it was, she and I bored each other stiff. There’s an irony for you! But as for pining, I ask you whether any girl in her senses could pine for me. Look at me, and tell me! Or rather, don’t look at me; I can’t bear to be looked at.”
Here was one of Michael’s morbid sensitivenesses. He seldom forgot his own physical appearance, the fact of which was to him appalling. His stumpy figure with its big body, his broad, blunt-featured face, his long arms, his large hands and feet, his clumsiness in movement were to him of the nature of a constant nightmare, and it was only with Francis and the ease that his solitary presence gave, or when he was occupied with music that he wholly lost his self-consciousness in this respect. It seemed to him that he must be as repulsive to others as he was to himself, which was a distorted view of the case. Plain without doubt he was, and of heavy and ungainly build; but his belief in the finality of his uncouthness was morbid and imaginary, and half his inability to get on with his fellows, no less than with the maidens who were brought down in single file to Ashbridge, was due to this. He knew very well how light-heartedly they escaped to the geniality and attractiveness of Francis, and in the clutch of his own introspective temperament he could not free himself from the handicap of his own sensitiveness, and, like others, take himself for granted. He crushed his own power to please by the weight of his judgments on himself.
“So there’s another reason to complain of the irony of fate,” he said. “I don’t want to marry anybody, and God knows nobody wants to marry me. But, then, it’s my duty to become the father of another Lord Ashbridge, as if there had not been enough of them already, and his mother must be a certain kind of girl, with whom I have nothing in common. So I say that if only we could have changed places, you would have filled my niche so perfectly, and I should have been free to bury myself in Leipzig or Munich, and lived like the grub I certainly am, and have drowned myself in a sea of music. As it is, goodness knows what my father will say to the letter I wrote him yesterday, which he will have received this morning. However, that will soon be patent, for I go down there to-morrow. I wish you were coming with me. Can’t you manage to for a day or two, and help things along? Aunt Barbara will be there.”
Francis consulted a small, green morocco pocket-book.
“Can’t to-morrow,” he said, “nor yet the day after. But perhaps I could get a few days’ leave next week.”
“Next week’s no use. I go to Baireuth next week.”
“Baireuth? Who’s Baireuth?” asked Francis.
“Oh, a man I know. His other name was Wagner, and he wrote some tunes.”
Francis nodded.
“Oh, but I’ve heard of him,” he said. “They’re rather long tunes, aren’t they? At least I found them so when I went to the opera the other night. Go on with your plans, Mike. What do you mean to do after that?”
“Go on to Munich and hear the same tunes over, again. After that I shall come back and settle down in town and study.”
“Play the piano?” asked Francis, amiably trying to enter into his cousin’s schemes.
Michael laughed.
“No doubt that will come into it,” he said. “But it’s rather as if you told somebody you were a soldier, and he said: ‘Oh, is that quick march?’”
“So it is. Soldiering largely consists of quick march, especially when it’s more than usually hot.”
“Well, I shall learn to play the piano,” said Michael.
“But you play so rippingly already,” said Francis cordially. “You played all those songs the other night which you had never seen before. If you can do that, there is nothing more you want to learn with the piano, is there?”
“You are talking rather as father will talk,” observed Michael.
“Am I? Well, I seem to be talking sense.”
“You weren’t doing what you seemed, then. I’ve got absolutely everything to learn about the piano.”
Francis rose.
“Then it is clear I don’t understand anything about it,” he said. “Nor, I suppose, does Uncle Robert. But, really, I rather envy you, Mike. Anyhow, you want to do and be something so much that you are gaily going to face unpleasantnesses with Uncle Robert about it. Now, I wouldn’t face unpleasantnesses with anybody about anything I wanted to do, and I suppose the reason must be that I don’t want to do anything enough.”
“The malady of not wanting,” quoted Michael.
“Yes, I’ve got that malady. The ordinary things that one naturally does are all so pleasant, and take all the time there is, that I don’t want anything particular, especially now that you’ve been such a brick—”
“Stop it,” said Michael.
“Right; I got it in rather cleverly. I was saying that it must be rather nice to want a thing so much that you’ll go through a lot to get it. Most fellows aren’t like that.”
“A good many fellows are jelly-fish,” observed Michael.
“I suppose so. I’m one, you know. I drift and float. But I don’t think I sting. What are you doing to-night, by the way?”
“Playing the piano, I hope. Why?”
“Only that two fellows are dining with me, and I thought perhaps you would come. Aunt Barbara sent me the ticket for a box at the Gaiety, too, and we might look in there. Then there’s a dance somewhere.”
“Thanks very much, but I think I won’t,” said Michael. “I’m rather looking forward to an evening alone.”
“And that’s an odd thing to look forward to,” remarked Francis.
“Not when you want to play the piano. I shall have a chop here at eight, and probably thump away till midnight.”
Francis looked round for his hat and stick.
“I must go,” he said. “I ought to have gone long ago, but I didn’t want to. The malady came in again. Most of the world have got it, you know, Michael.”
Michael rose and stood by his tall cousin.
“I think we English have got it,” he said. “At least, the English you and I know have got it. But I don’t believe the Germans, for instance, have. They’re in deadly earnest about all sorts of things—music among them, which is the point that concerns me. The music of the world is German, you know!”
Francis demurred to this.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “This thing at the Gaiety is ripping, I believe. Do come and see.”
Michael resisted this chance of revising his opinion about the German origin of music, and Francis drifted out into Piccadilly. It was already getting on for seven o’clock, and the roadway and pavements were full of people who seemed rather to contradict Michael’s theory that the nation generally suffered from the malady of not wanting, so eagerly and numerously were they on the quest for amusement. Already the street was a mass of taxicabs and private motors containing, each one of them, men and women in evening dress, hurrying out to dine before the theatre or the opera. Bright, eager faces peered out, with sheen of silk and glitter of gems; they all seemed alert and prosperous and keen for the daily hours of evening entertainment. A crowd similar in spirit pervaded the pavements, white-shirted men with coat on arm stepped in and out of swinging club doors and the example set by the leisured class seemed copiously copied by those whom desks and shops had made prisoners all day. The air of the whole town, swarming with the nation that is supposed to make so grave an affair of its amusements, was indescribably gay and lighthearted; the whole city seemed set on enjoying itself. The buses that boomed along were packed inside and out, and each was placarded with advertisement of some popular piece at theatre or music-hall. Inside the Green Park the grass was populous with lounging figures, who, unable to pay for indoor entertainment, were making the most of what the coolness of sunset and grass supplied them with gratis; the newsboards of itinerant sellers contained nothing of more serious import than the result of cricket matches; and, as the dusk began to fall, street lamps and signs were lit, like early rising stars, so that no hint of the gathering night should be permitted to intrude on the perpetually illuminated city. All that was sordid and sad, all that was busy (except on these gay errands of pleasure) was shuffled away out of sight, so that the pleasure seekers might be excused for believing that there was nothing in the world that could demand their attention except the need of amusing themselves successfully. The workers toiled in order that when the working day was over the fruits of their labour might yield a harvest of a few hours’ enjoyment; silkworms had spun so that from carriage windows might glimmer the wrappings made from their cocoons; divers had been imperilled in deep seas so that the pearls they had won might embellish the necks of these fair wearers.
To Francis this all seemed very natural and proper, part of the recognised order of things that made up the series of sensations known to him as life. He did not, as he had said, very particularly care about anything, and it was undoubtedly true that there was no motive or conscious purpose in his life for which he would voluntarily have undergone any important stress of discomfort or annoyance. It was true that in pursuance of his profession there was a certain amount of “quick marching” and drill to be done in the heat, but that was incidental to the fact that he was in the Guards, and more than compensated for by the pleasures that were also naturally incidental to it. He would have been quite unable to think of anything that he would sooner do than what he did; and he had sufficient of the ingrained human tendency to do something of the sort, which was a matter of routine rather than effort, than have nothing whatever, except the gratification of momentary whims, to fill his day. Besides, it was one of the conventions or even conditions of life that every boy on leaving school “did” something for a certain number of years. Some went into business in order to acquire the wealth that should procure them leisure; some, like himself, became soldiers or sailors, not because they liked guns and ships, but because to boys of a certain class these professions supplied honourable employment and a pleasant time. Without being in any way slack in his regimental duties, he performed them as many others did, without the smallest grain of passion, and without any imaginative forecast as to what fruit, if any, there might be to these hours spent in drill and discipline. He was but one of a very large number who do their work without seriously bothering their heads about its possible meaning or application. His particular job gave a young man a pleasant position and an easy path to general popularity, given that he was willing to be sociable and amused. He was extremely ready to be both the one and the other, and there his philosophy of life stopped.
And, indeed, it seemed on this hot July evening that the streets were populated by philosophers like unto himself. Never had England generally been more prosperous, more secure, more comfortable. The heavens of international politics were as serene as the evening sky; not yet was the storm-cloud that hung over Ireland bigger than a man’s hand; east, west, north and south there brooded the peace of the close of a halcyon day, and the amazing doings of the Suffragettes but added a slight incentive to the perusal of the morning paper. The arts flourished, harvests prospered; the world like a newly-wound clock seemed to be in for a spell of serene and orderly ticking, with an occasional chime just to show how the hours were passing.
London was an extraordinarily pleasant place, people were friendly, amusements beckoned on all sides; and for Francis, as for so many others, but a very moderate amount of work was necessary to win him an approved place in the scheme of things, a seat in the slow-wheeling sunshine. It really was not necessary to want, above all to undergo annoyances for the sake of what you wanted, since so many pleasurable distractions, enough to fill day and night twice over, were so richly spread around.
Some day he supposed he would marry, settle down and become in time one of those men who presented a bald head in a club window to the gaze of passers-by. It was difficult, perhaps, to see how you could enjoy yourself or lead a life that paid its own way in pleasure at the age of forty, but that he trusted that he would learn in time. At present it was sufficient to know that in half an hour two excellent friends would come to dinner, and that they would proceed in a spirit of amiable content to the Gaiety. After that there was a ball somewhere (he had forgotten where, but one of the others would be sure to know), and to-morrow and to-morrow would be like unto to-day. It was idle to ask questions of oneself when all went so well; the time for asking questions was when there was matter for complaint, and with him assuredly there was none. The advantages of being twenty-three years old, gay and good-looking, without a care in the world, now that he had Michael’s cheque in his pocket, needed no comment, still less complaint. He, like the crowd who had sufficient to pay for a six-penny seat at a music-hall, was perfectly content with life in general; to-morrow would be time enough to do a little more work and glean a little more pleasure.
It was indeed an admirable England, where it was not necessary even to desire, for there were so many things, bright, cheerful things to distract the mind from desire. It was a day of dozing in the sun, like the submerged, scattered units or duets on the grass of the Green Park, of behaving like the lilies of the field. . . . Francis found he was rather late, and proceeded hastily to his mother’s house in Savile Row to array himself, if not “like one of these,” like an exceedingly well-dressed young man, who demanded of his tailor the utmost of his art; with the prospect, owing to Michael’s generosity, of being paid to-morrow.
Michael, when his cousin had left him, did not at once proceed to his evening by himself with his piano, though an hour before he had longed to be alone with it and a pianoforte arrangement of the Meistersingers, of which he had promised himself a complete perusal that evening. But Francis’s visit had already distracted him, and he found now that Francis’s departure took him even farther away from his designed evening. Francis, with his good looks and his gay spirits, his easy friendships and perfect content (except when a small matter of deficit and dunning letters obscured the sunlight for a moment), was exactly all that he would have wished to be himself. But the moment he formulated that wish in his mind, he knew that he would not voluntarily have parted with one atom of his own individuality in order to be Francis or anybody else. He was aware how easy and pleasant life would become if he could look on it with Francis’s eyes, and if the world would look on him as it looked on his cousin. There would be no more bother. . . . In a moment, he would, by this exchange, have parted with his own unhappy temperament, his own deplorable body, and have stepped into an amiable and prosperous little neutral kingdom that had no desires and no regrets. He would have been free from all wants, except such as could be gratified so easily by a little work and a great capacity for being amused; he would have found himself excellently fitting the niche into which the rulers of birth and death had placed him: an eldest son of a great territorial magnate, who had what was called a stake in the country, and desired nothing better.
Willingly, as he had said, would he have changed circumstances with Francis, but he knew that he would not, for any bait the world could draw in front of him, have changed natures with him, even when, to all appearance, the gain would so vastly have been on his side. It was better to want and to miss than to be content. Even at this moment, when Francis had taken the sunshine out of the room with his departure, Michael clung to his own gloom and his own uncouthness, if by getting rid of them he would also have been obliged to get rid of his own temperament, unhappy as it was, but yet capable of strong desire. He did not want to be content; he wanted to see always ahead of him a golden mist, through which the shadows of unconjecturable shapes appeared. He was willing and eager to get lost, if only he might go wandering on, groping with his big hands, stumbling with his clumsy feet, desiring . . .
There are the indications of a path visible to all who desire. Michael knew that his path, the way that seemed to lead in the direction of the ultimate goal, was music. There, somehow, in that direction lay his destiny; that was the route. He was not like the majority of his sex and years, who weave their physical and mental dreams in the loom of a girl’s face, in her glance, in the curves of her mouth. Deliberately, owing chiefly to his morbid consciousness of his own physical defects, he had long been accustomed to check the instincts natural to a young man in this regard. He had seen too often the facility with which others, more fortunate than he, get delightedly lost in that golden haze; he had experienced too often the absence of attractiveness in himself. How could any girl of the London ballroom, he had so frequently asked himself, tolerate dancing or sitting out with him when there was Francis, and a hundred others like him, so pleased to take his place? Nor, so he told himself, was his mind one whit more apt than his body. It did not move lightly and agreeably with unconscious smiles and easy laughter. By nature he was monkish, he was celibate. He could but cease to burn incense at such ineffectual altars, and help, as he had helped this afternoon, to replenish the censers of more fortunate acolytes.
This was all familiar to him; it passed through his head unbidden, when Francis had left him, like the refrain of some well-known song, occurring spontaneously without need of an effort of memory. It was a possession of his, known by heart, and it no longer, except for momentary twinges, had any bitterness for him. This afternoon, it is true, there had been one such, when Francis, gleeful with his cheque, had gone out to his dinner and his theatre and his dance, inviting him cheerfully to all of them. In just that had been the bitterness—namely, that Francis had so overflowing a well-spring of content that he could be cordial in bidding him cast a certain gloom over these entertainments. Michael knew, quite unerringly, that Francis and his friends would not enjoy themselves quite so much if he was with them; there would be the restraint of polite conversation at dinner instead of completely idle babble, there would be less outspoken normality at the Gaiety, a little more decorum about the whole of the boyish proceedings. He knew all that so well, so terribly well. . . .
His servant had come in with the evening paper, and the implied suggestion of the propriety of going to dress before he roused himself. He decided not to dress, as he was going to spend the evening alone, and, instead, he seated himself at the piano with his copy of the Meistersingers and, mechanically at first, with the ragged cloud-fleeces of his reverie hanging about his brain, banged away at the overture. He had extraordinary dexterity of finger for one who had had so little training, and his hands, with their great stretch, made light work of octaves and even tenths. His knowledge of the music enabled him to wake the singing bird of memory in his head, and before long flute and horn and string and woodwind began to make themselves heard in his inner ear. Twice his servant came in to tell him that his dinner was ready, but Michael had no heed for anything but the sounds which his flying fingers suggested to him. Francis, his father, his own failure in the life that had been thrust on him were all gone; he was with the singers of Nuremberg.
CHAPTER II
The River Ashe, after a drowsy and meandering childhood, passed peacefully among the sedges and marigolds of its water meadows, suddenly and somewhat disconcertingly grows up and, without any period of transition and adolescence, becomes, from being a mere girl of a rivulet, a male and full-blooded estuary of the sea. At Coton, for instance, the tips of the sculls of a sauntering pleasure-boat will almost span its entire width, while, but a mile farther down, you will see stone-laden barges and tall, red-winged sailing craft coming up with the tide, and making fast to the grey wooden quay wall of Ashbridge, rough with barnacles. For the reeds and meadow-sweet of its margin are exchanged the brown and green growths of the sea, with their sharp, acrid odour instead of the damp, fresh smell of meadow flowers, and at low tide the podded bladders of brown weed and long strings of marine macaroni, among which peevish crabs scuttle sideways, take the place of the grass and spires of loosestrife; and over the water, instead of singing larks, hang white companies of chiding seagulls. Here at high tide extends a sheet of water large enough, when the wind blows up the estuary, to breed waves that break in foam and spray against the barges, while at the ebb acres of mud flats are disclosed on which the boats lean slanting till the flood lifts them again and makes them strain at the wheezing ropes that tie them to the quay.
A year before the flame of war went roaring through Europe in unquenchable conflagration it would have seemed that nothing could possibly rouse Ashbridge from its red-brick Georgian repose. There was never a town so inimitably drowsy or so sternly uncompetitive. A hundred years ago it must have presented almost precisely the same appearance as it did in the summer of 1913, if we leave out of reckoning a few dozen of modern upstart villas that line its outskirts, and the very inconspicuous railway station that hides itself behind the warehouses near the river’s bank. Most of the trains, too, quite ignore its existence, and pass through it on their way to more rewarding stopping-places, hardly recognising it even by a spurt of steam from their whistles, and it is only if you travel by those that require the most frequent pauses in their progress that you will be enabled to alight at its thin and depopulated platform.
Just outside the station there perennially waits a low-roofed and sanguine omnibus that under daily discouragement continues to hope that in the long-delayed fulness of time somebody will want to be driven somewhere. (This nobody ever does, since the distance to any house is so small, and a porter follows with luggage on a barrow.) It carries on its floor a quantity of fresh straw, in the manner of the stage coaches, in which the problematic passenger, should he ever appear, will no doubt bury his feet. On its side, just below the window that is not made to open, it carries the legend that shows that it belongs to the Comber Arms, a hostelry so self-effacing that it is discoverable only by the sharpest-eyed of pilgrims. Narrow roadways, flanked by proportionately narrower pavements, lie ribbon-like between huddled shops and squarely-spacious Georgian houses; and an air of leisure and content, amounting almost to stupefaction, is the moral atmosphere of the place.
On the outskirts of the town, crowning the gentle hills that lie to the north and west, villas in acre plots, belonging to business men in the county town some ten miles distant, “prick their Cockney ears” and are strangely at variance with the sober gravity of the indigenous houses. So, too, are the manners and customs of their owners, who go to Stoneborough every morning to their work, and return by the train that brings them home in time for dinner. They do other exotic and unsuitable things also, like driving swiftly about in motors, in playing golf on the other side of the river at Coton, and in having parties at each other’s houses. But apart from them nobody ever seems to leave Ashbridge (though a stroll to the station about the time that the evening train arrives is a recognised diversion) or, in consequence, ever to come back. Ashbridge, in fact, is self-contained, and desires neither to meddle with others nor to be meddled with.
The estuary opposite the town is some quarter of a mile broad at high tide, and in order to cross to the other side, where lie the woods and park of Ashbridge House, it is necessary to shout and make staccato prancings in order to attract the attention of the antique ferryman, who is invariably at the other side of the river and generally asleep at the bottom of his boat. If you are strong-lunged and can prance and shout for a long time, he may eventually stagger to his feet, come across for you and row you over. Otherwise you will stand but little chance of arousing him from his slumbers, and you will stop where you are, unless you choose to walk round by the bridge at Coton, a mile above.
Periodical attempts are made by the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge, who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged and ineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing ever results from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed to the town council on the subject are never heard of again. “Old George” was ferryman there before any members of the town council were born, and he seems to have established a right to go to sleep on the other side of the river which is now inalienable from him. Besides, asleep or awake, he is always perfectly sober, which, after all, is really one of the first requirements for a suitable ferryman. Even the representations of Lord Ashbridge himself who, when in residence, frequently has occasion to use the ferry when crossing from his house to the town, failed to produce the smallest effect, and he was compelled to build a boathouse of his own on the farther bank, and be paddled across by himself or one of the servants. Often he rowed himself, for he used to be a fine oarsman, and it was good for the lounger on the quay to see the foaming prow of his vigorous progress and the dignity of physical toil.
In all other respects, except in this case of “Old George,” Lord Ashbridge’s wishes were law to the local authorities, for in this tranquil East-coast district the spirit of the feudal system with a beneficent lord and contented tenants strongly survived. It had triumphed even over such modern innovations as railroads, for Lord Ashbridge had the undoubted right to stop any train he pleased by signal at Ashbridge station. This he certainly enjoyed doing; it fed his sense of the fitness of things to progress along the platform with his genial, important tiptoe walk, and elbows squarely stuck out, to the carriage that was at once reserved for him, to touch the brim of his grey top-hat (if travelling up to town) to the obsequious guard, and to observe the heads of passengers who wondered why their express was arrested, thrust out of carriage windows to look at him. A livened footman, as well as a valet, followed him, bearing a coat and a rug and a morning or evening paper and a dispatch-box with a large gilt coronet on it, and bestowed these solaces to a railway journey on the empty seats near him. And not only his sense of fitness was hereby fed, but that also of the station-master and the solitary porter and the newsboy, and such inhabitants of Ashbridge as happened to have strolled on to the platform. For he was THEIR Earl of Ashbridge, kind, courteous and dominant, a local king; it was all very pleasant.
But this arrest of express trains was a strictly personal privilege; when Lady Ashbridge or Michael travelled they always went in the slow train to Stoneborough, changed there and abided their time on the platform like ordinary mortals. Though he could undoubtedly have extended his rights to the stopping of a train for his wife or son, he wisely reserved this for himself, lest it should lose prestige. There was sufficient glory already (to probe his mind to the bottom) for Lady Ashbridge in being his wife; it was sufficient also for Michael that he was his son.
It may be inferred that there was a touch of pomposity about this admirable gentleman, who was so excellent a landlord and so hard working a member of the British aristocracy. But pomposity would be far too superficial a word to apply to him; it would not adequately connote his deep-abiding and essential conviction that on one of the days of Creation (that, probably, on which the decree was made that there should be Light) there leaped into being the great landowners of England.
But Lord Ashbridge, though himself a peer, by no means accepted the peerage en bloc as representing the English aristocracy; to be, in his phrase, “one of us” implied that you belonged to certain well-ascertained families where brewers and distinguished soldiers had no place, unless it was theirs already. He was ready to pay all reasonable homage to those who were distinguished by their abilities, their riches, their exalted positions in Church and State, but his homage to such was transfused with a courteous condescension, and he only treated as his equals and really revered those who belonged to the families that were “one of us.”
His wife, of course, was “one of us,” since he would never have permitted himself to be allied to a woman who was not, though for beauty and wisdom she might have been Aphrodite and Athene rolled compactly into one peerless identity. As a matter of fact, Lady Ashbridge had not the faintest resemblance to either of these effulgent goddesses. In person she resembled a camel, long and lean, with a drooping mouth and tired, patient eyes, while in mind she was stunned. No idea other than an obvious one ever had birth behind her high, smooth forehead, and she habitually brought conversation to a close by the dry enunciation of something indubitably true, which had no direct relation to the point under discussion. But she had faint, ineradicable prejudices, and instincts not quite dormant. There was a large quantity of mild affection in her nature, the quality of which may be illustrated by the fact that when her father died she cried a little every day after breakfast for about six weeks. Then she did not cry any more. It was impossible not to like what there was of her, but there was really very little to like, for she belonged heart and soul to the generation and the breeding among which it is enough for a woman to be a lady, and visit the keeper’s wife when she has a baby.
But though there was so little of her, the balance was made up for by the fact that there was so much of her husband. His large, rather flamboyant person, his big white face and curling brown beard, his loud voice and his falsetto laugh, his absolutely certain opinions, above all the fervency of his consciousness of being Lord Ashbridge and all which that implied, completely filled any place he happened to be in, so that a room empty except for him gave the impression of being almost uncomfortably crowded. This keen consciousness of his identity was naturally sufficient to make him very good humoured, since he was himself a fine example of the type that he admired most. Probably only two persons in the world had the power of causing him annoyance, but both of these, by an irony of fate that it seemed scarcely possible to consider accidental, were closely connected with him, for one was his sister, the other his only son.
The grounds of their potentiality in this respect can be easily stated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so “one of us”), had married an extremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge’s view, could not be considered one of anybody at all; in other words, his imagination failed to picture a whole class of people who resembled Anthony Jerome. He had hoped when his sister announced her intention of taking this deplorable step that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be a snob—he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs—and that thus Mr. Jerome would have the saving grace to admire and toady him. But Mr. Jerome showed no signs of doing anything of the sort; he treated him with an austere and distant politeness that Lord Ashbridge could not construe as being founded on admiration and a sense of his own inferiority, for it was so clearly founded on dislike. That, however, did not annoy Lord Ashbridge, for it was easy to suppose that poor Mr. Jerome knew no better. But Barbara annoyed him, for not only had she shown herself a renegade in marrying a man who was not “one of us,” but with all the advantages she had enjoyed since birth of knowing what “we” were, she gloried in her new relations, saying, without any proper reticence about the matter, that they were Real People, whose character and wits vastly transcended anything that Combers had to show.
Michael was an even more vexatious case, and in moments of depression his father thought that he would really turn in his grave at the dismal idea of Michael having stepped into his honourable shoes. Physically he was utterly unlike a Comber, and his mind, his general attitude towards life seemed to have diverged even farther from that healthy and unreflective pattern. Only this morning his father had received a letter from him that summed Michael up, that fulfilled all the doubts and fears that had hung about him; for after three years in the Guards he had, without consultation with anybody, resigned his commission on the inexplicable grounds that he wanted to do something with his life. To begin with that was rankly heretical; if you were a Comber there was no need to do anything with your life; life did everything for you. . . . And what this un-Comberish young man wanted to do with his life was to be a musician. That musicians, artists, actors, had a right to exist Lord Ashbridge did not question. They were no doubt (or might be) very excellent people in their way, and as a matter of fact he often recognised their existence by going to the opera, to the private view of the Academy, or to the play, and he took a very considerable pride of proprietorship in his own admirable collection of family portraits. But then those were pictures of Combers; Reynolds and Romney and the rest of them had enjoyed the privilege of perpetuating on their canvases these big, fine men and charming women. But that a Comber—and that one positively the next Lord Ashbridge—should intend to devote his energies to an artistic calling, and allude to that scheme as doing something with his life, was a thing as unthinkable as if the butler had developed a fixed idea that he was “one of us.”
The blow was a recent one; Michael’s letter had only reached his father this morning, and at the present moment Lord Ashbridge was attempting over a cup of tea on the long south terrace overlooking the estuary to convey—not very successfully—to his wife something of his feelings on the subject. She, according to her custom, was drinking a little hot water herself, and providing her Chinese pug with a mixture of cream and crumbled rusks. Though the dog was of undoubtedly high lineage, Lord Ashbridge rather detested her.
“A musical career!” he exclaimed, referring to Michael’s letter. “What sort of a career for a Comber is a musical career? I shall tell Michael pretty roundly when he arrives this evening what I think of it all. We shall have Francis next saying that he wants to resign, too, and become a dentist.”
Lady Ashbridge considered this for a moment in her stunned mind.
“Dear me, Robert, I hope not,” she said. “I do not think it the least likely that Francis would do anything of the kind. Look, Petsy is better; she has drunk her cream and rusks quite up. I think it was only the heat.”
He gave a little good-humoured giggle of falsetto laughter.
“I wish, Marion,” he said, “that you could manage to take your mind off your dog for a moment and attend to me. And I must really ask you not to give your Petsy any more cream, or she will certainly be sick.”
Lady Ashbridge gave a little sigh.
“All gone, Petsy,” she said.
“I am glad it has all gone,” said he, “and we will hope it won’t return. But about Michael now!”
Lady Ashbridge pulled herself together.
“Yes, poor Michael!” she said. “He is coming to-night, is he not? But just now you were speaking of Francis, and the fear of his wanting to be a dentist!”
“Well, I am now speaking of Michael’s wanting to be a musician. Of course that is utterly out of the question. If, as he says, he has sent in his resignation, he will just have to beg them to cancel it. Michael seems not to have the slightest idea of the duties which his birth and position entail on him. Unfitted for the life he now leads . . . waste of time. . . . Instead he proposes to go to Baireuth in August, and then to settle down in London to study!”
Lady Ashbridge recollected the almanac.
“That will be in September, then,” she said. “I do not think I was ever in London in September. I did not know that anybody was.”
“The point, my dear, is not how or where you have been accustomed to spend your Septembers,” said her husband. “What we are talking about is—”
“Yes, dear, I know quite well what we are talking about,” said she. “We are talking about Michael not studying music all September.”
Lord Ashbridge got up and began walking across the terrace opposite the tea-table with his elbows stuck out and his feet lifted rather high.
“Michael doesn’t seem to realise that he is not Tom or Dick or Harry,” said he. “Music, indeed! I’m musical myself; all we Combers are musical. But Michael is my only son, and it really distresses me to see how little sense he has of his responsibilities. Amusements are all very well; it is not that I want to cut him off his amusements, but when it comes to a career—”
Lady Ashbridge was surreptitiously engaged in pouring out a little more cream for Petsy, and her husband, turning rather sooner than she had expected, caught her in the act.
“Do not give Petsy any more cream,” he said, with some asperity; “I absolutely forbid it.”
Lady Ashbridge quite composedly replaced the cream-jug.
“Poor Petsy!” she observed.
“I ask you to attend to me, Marion,” he said.
“But I am attending to you very well, Robert,” said she, “and I understand you perfectly. You do not want Michael to be a musician in September and wear long hair and perhaps play at concerts. I am sure I quite agree with you, for such a thing would be as unheard of in my family as in yours. But how do you propose to stop it?”
“I shall use my authority,” he said, stepping a little higher.
“Yes, dear, I am sure you will. But what will happen if Michael doesn’t pay any attention to your authority? You will be worse off than ever. Poor Michael is very obedient when he is told to do anything he intends to do, but when he doesn’t agree it is difficult to do anything with him. And, you see, he is quite independent of you with my mother having left him so much money. Poor mamma!”
Lord Ashbridge felt strongly about this.
“It was a most extraordinary disposition of her property for your mother to make,” he observed. “It has given Michael an independence which I much deplore. And she did it in direct opposition to my wishes.”
This touched on one of the questions about which Lady Ashbridge had her convictions. She had a mild but unalterable opinion that when anybody died, all that they had previously done became absolutely flawless and laudable.
“Mamma did as she thought right with her property,” she said, “and it is not for us to question it. She was conscientiousness itself. You will have to excuse my listening to any criticism you may feel inclined to make about her, Robert.”
“Certainly, my dear. I only want you to listen to me about Michael. You agree with me on the impossibility of his adopting a musical career. I cannot, at present, think so ill of Michael as to suppose that he will defy our joint authority.”
“Michael has a great will of his own,” she remarked. “He gets that from you, Robert, though he gets his money from his grandmother.”
The futility of further discussion with his wife began to dawn on Lord Ashbridge, as it dawned on everybody who had the privilege of conversing with her. Her mind was a blind alley that led nowhere; it was clear that she had no idea to contribute to the subject except slightly pessimistic forebodings with which, unfortunately, he found himself secretly disposed to agree. He had always felt that Michael was an uncomfortable sort of boy; in other words, that he had the inconvenient habit of thinking things out for himself, instead of blindly accepting the conclusions of other people.
Much as Lord Ashbridge valued the sturdy independence of character which he himself enjoyed displaying, he appreciated it rather less highly when it was manifested by people who were not sensible enough to agree with him. He looked forward to Michael’s arrival that evening with the feeling that there was a rebellious standard hoisted against the calm blue of the evening sky, and remembering the advent of his sister he wondered whether she would not join the insurgent. Barbara Jerome, as has been remarked, often annoyed her brother; she also genially laughed at him; but Lord Ashbridge, partly from affection, partly from a loyal family sense of clanship, always expected his sister to spend a fortnight with him in August, and would have been much hurt had she refused to do so. Her husband, however, so far from spending a fortnight with his brother-in-law, never spent a minute in his presence if it could possibly be avoided, an arrangement which everybody concerned considered to be wise, and in the interests of cordiality.
“And Barbara comes this evening as well as Michael, does she not?” he said. “I hope she will not take Michael’s part in his absurd scheme.”
“I have given Barbara the blue room,” said Lady Ashbridge, after a little thought. “I am afraid she may bring her great dog with her. I hope he will not quarrel with Petsy. Petsy does not like other dogs.”
The day had been very hot, and Lord Ashbridge, not having taken any exercise, went off to have a round of golf with the professional of the links that lay not half a mile from the house. He considered exercise an essential part of the true Englishman’s daily curriculum, and as necessary a contribution to the traditional mode of life which made them all what they were—or should be—as a bath in the morning or attendance at church on Sunday. He did not care so much about playing golf with a casual friend, because the casual friend, as a rule, casually beat him—thus putting him in an un-English position—and preferred a game with this first-class professional whose duty it was—in complete violation of his capacities—to play just badly enough to be beaten towards the end of the round after an exciting match. It required a good deal of cleverness and self-control to accomplish this, for Lord Ashbridge was a notably puerile performer, but he generally managed it with tact and success, by dint of missing absurdly easy putts, and (here his skill came in) by pulling and slicing his ball into far-distant bunkers. Throughout the game it was his business to keep up a running fire of admiring ejaculations such as “Well driven, my lord,” or “A fine putt, my lord. Ah! dear me, I wish I could putt like that,” though occasionally his chorus of praise betrayed him into error, and from habit he found himself saying: “Good shot, my lord,” when my lord had just made an egregious mess of things. But on the whole he devised so pleasantly sycophantic an atmosphere as to procure a substantial tip for himself, and to make Lord Ashbridge conscious of being a very superior performer. Whether at the bottom of his heart he knew he could not play at all, he probably did not inquire; the result of his matches and his opponent’s skilfully-showered praise was sufficient for him. So now he left the discouraging companionship of his wife and Petsy and walked swingingly across the garden and the park to the links, there to seek in Macpherson’s applause the self-confidence that would enable him to encounter his republican sister and his musical son with an unyielding front.
His spirits mounted rapidly as he went. It pleased him to go jauntily across the lawn and reflect that all this smooth turf was his, to look at the wealth of well-tended flowers in his garden and know that all this polychromatic loveliness was bred in Lord Ashbridge’s borders (and was graciously thrown open to the gaze of the admiring public on Sunday afternoon, when they were begged to keep off the grass), and that Lord Ashbridge was himself. He liked reminding himself that the towering elms drew their leafy verdure from Lord Ashbridge’s soil; that the rows of hen-coops in the park, populous and cheeping with infant pheasants, belonged to the same fortunate gentleman who in November would so unerringly shoot them down as they rocketted swiftly over the highest of his tree-tops; that to him also appertained the long-fronted Jacobean house which stood so commandingly upon the hill-top, and glowed with all the mellowness of its three-hundred-years-old bricks. And his satisfaction was not wholly fatuous nor entirely personal; all these spacious dignities were insignia (temporarily conferred on him, like some order, and permanently conferred on his family) of the splendid political constitution under which England had made herself mistress of an empire and the seas that guarded it. Probably he would have been proud of belonging to that even if he had not been “one of us”; as it was, the high position which he occupied in it caused that pride to be slightly mixed with the pride that was concerned with the notion of the Empire belonging to him and his peers.
But though he was the most profound of Tories, he would truthfully have professed (as indeed he practised in the management of his estates) the most Liberal opinions as to schemes for the amelioration of the lower classes. Only, just as the music he was good enough to listen to had to be played for him, so the tenants and farmers had to be his dependents. He looked after them very well indeed, conceiving this to be the prime duty of a great landlord, but his interest in them was really proprietary. It was of his bounty, and of his complete knowledge of what his duties as “one of us” were, that he did so, and any legislation which compelled him to part with one pennyworth of his property for the sake of others less fortunate he resisted to the best of his ability as a theft of what was his. The country, in fact, if it went to the dogs (and certain recent legislation distinctly seemed to point kennelwards), would go to the dogs because ignorant politicians, who were most emphatically not “of us,” forced him and others like him to recognise the rights of dependents instead of trusting to their instinctive fitness to dispense benefits not as rights but as acts of grace. If England trusted to her aristocracy (to put the matter in a nutshell) all would be well with her in the future even as it had been in the past, but any attempt to curtail their splendours must inevitably detract from the prestige and magnificence of the Empire. . . . And he responded suitably to the obsequious salute of the professional, and remembered that the entire golf links were his property, and that the Club paid a merely nominal rental to him, just the tribute money of a penny which was due to Caesar.
For the next hour or two after her husband had left her, Lady Ashbridge occupied herself in the thoroughly lady-like pursuit of doing nothing whatever; she just existed in her comfortable chair, since Barbara might come any moment, and she would have to entertain her, which she frequently did unawares. But as Barbara continued not to come, she took up her perennial piece of needlework, feeling rather busy and pressed, and had hardly done so when her sister-in-law arrived.
She was preceded by an enormous stag-hound, who, having been shut up in her motor all the way from London, bounded delightedly, with the sense of young limbs released, on to the terrace, and made wild leaps in a circle round the horrified Petsy, who had just received a second saucerful of cream. Once he dashed in close, and with a single lick of his tongue swept the saucer dry of nutriment, and with hoarse barkings proceeded again to dance corybantically about, while Lady Ashbridge with faint cries of dismay waved her embroidery at him. Then, seeing his mistress coming out of the French window from the drawing-room, he bounded calf-like towards her, and Petsy, nearly sick with cream and horror, was gathered to Lady Ashbridge’s bosom.
“My dear Barbara,” she said, “how upsetting your dog is! Poor Petsy’s heart is beating terribly; she does not like dogs. But I am very pleased to see you, and I have given you the blue room.”
It was clearly suitable that Barbara Jerome should have a large dog, for both in mind and body she was on the large scale herself. She had a pleasant, high-coloured face, was very tall, enormously stout, and moved with great briskness and vigour. She had something to say on any subject that came on the board; and, what was less usual in these days of universal knowledge, there was invariably some point in what she said. She had, in the ordinary sense of the word, no manners at all, but essentially made up for this lack by her sincere and humourous kindliness. She saw with acute vividness the ludicrous side of everybody, herself included, and to her mind the arch-humourist of all was her brother, whom she was quite unable to take seriously. She dressed as if she had looted a milliner’s shop and had put on in a great hurry anything that came to hand. She towered over her sister-in-law as she kissed her, and Petsy, safe in her citadel, barked shrilly.
“My dear, which is the blue room?” she said. “I hope it is big enough for Og and me. Yes, that is Og, which is short for dog. He takes two mutton-chops for dinner, and a little something during the night if he feels disposed, because he is still growing. Tony drove down with me, and is in the car now. He would not come in for fear of seeing Robert, so I ventured to tell them to take him a cup of tea there, which he will drink with the blinds down, and then drive back to town again. He has been made American ambassador, by the way, and will go in to dinner before Robert. My dear, I can think of few things which Robert is less fitted to bear than that. However, we all have our crosses, even those of us who have our coronets also.”
Lady Ashbridge’s hospitable instincts asserted themselves. “But your husband must come in,” she said. “I will go and tell him. And Robert has gone to play golf.”
Barbara laughed.
“I am quite sure Tony won’t come in,” she said. “I promised him he shouldn’t, and he only drove down with me on the express stipulation that no risks were to be run about his seeing Robert. We must take no chances, so let him have his tea quietly in the motor and then drive away again. And who else is there? Anybody? Michael?”
“Michael comes this evening.”
“I am glad; I am particularly fond of Michael. Also he will play to us after dinner, and though I don’t know one note from another, it will relieve me of sitting in a stately circle watching Robert cheat at patience. I always find the evenings here rather trying; they remind me of being in church. I feel as if I were part of a corporate body, which leads to misplaced decorum. Ah! there is the sound of Tony’s retreating motor; his strategic movement has come off. And now give me some news, if you can get in a word. Dear me, there is Robert coming back across the lawn. What a mercy that Tony did not leave the motor. Robert always walks as if he was dancing a minuet. Look, there is Og imitating him! Or is he stalking him, thinking he is an enemy. Og, come here!”
She whistled shrilly on her fingers, and rose to greet her brother, whom Og was still menacing, as he advanced towards her with staccato steps. Barbara, however, got between Og and his prey, and threw her parasol at him.
“My dear, how are you?” she said. “And how did the golf go? And did you beat the professional?”
He suspected flippancy here, and became markedly dignified.
“An excellent match,” he said, “and Macpherson tells me I played a very sound game. I am delighted to see you, Barbara. And did Michael come down with you?”
“No. I drove from town. It saves time, but not expense, with your awful trains.”
“And you are well, and Mr. Jerome?” he asked. He always called his brother-in-law Mr. Jerome, to indicate the gulf between them. Barbara gave a little spurt of laughter.
“Yes, his excellency is quite well,” she said. “You must call him excellency now, my dear.”
“Indeed! That is a great step.”
“Considering that Tony began as an office-boy. How richly rewarding you are, my dear. And shan’t I make an odd ambassadress! I haven’t been to a Court since the dark ages, when I went to those beloved States. We will practise after dinner, dear, and you and Marion shall be the King and Queen, and I will try to walk backwards without tumbling on my head. You will like being the King, Robert. And then we will be ourselves again, all except Og, who shall be Tony and shall go out of the room before you.”
He gave his treble little giggle, for on the whole it answered better not to be dignified with Barbara, whenever he could remember not to be; and Lady Ashbridge, still nursing Petsy, threw a bombshell of the obvious to explode the conversation.
“Og has two mutton-chops for his dinner,” she said, “and he is growing still. Fancy!”
Lord Ashbridge took a refreshing glance at the broad stretch of country that all belonged to him.
“I am rather glad to have this opportunity of talking to you, my dear Barbara,” he said, “before Michael comes.”
“His train gets in half an hour before dinner” said Lady Ashbridge. “He has to change at Stoneborough.”
“Quite so. I heard from Michael this morning, saying that he has resigned his commission in the Guards, and is going to take up music seriously.”
Barbara gave a delighted exclamation.
“But how perfectly splendid!” she said. “Fancy a Comber doing anything original! Michael and I are the only Combers who ever have, since Combers ‘arose from out the azure main’ in the year one. I married an American; that’s something, though it’s not up to Michael!”
“That is not quite my view of it,” said he. “As for its being original, it would be original enough if Marion eloped with a Patagonian.”
Lady Ashbridge let fall her embroidery at this monstrous suggestion.
“You are talking very wildly, Robert,” she said, in a pained voice.
“My dear, get on with your sacred carpet,” said he. “I am talking to Barbara. I have already ascertained your—your lack of views on the subject. I was saying, Barbara, that mere originality is not a merit.”
“No, you never said that,” remarked Lady Ashbridge.
“I should have if you had allowed me to. And as for your saying that he has done it, Barbara, that is very wide of the mark, and I intend shall continue to be so.”
“Dear great Bashaw, that is just what you said to me when I told you I was going to marry his Excellency. But I did. And I think it is a glorious move on Michael’s part. It requires brain to find out what you like, and character to go and do it. Combers haven’t got brains as a rule, you see. If they ever had any, they have degenerated into conservative instincts.”
He again refreshed himself with the landscape. The roofs of Ashbridge were visible in the clear sunset. . . . Ashbridge paid its rents with remarkable regularity.
“That may or may not be so,” he said, forgetting for a moment the danger of being dignified. “But Combers have position.”
Barbara controlled herself admirably. A slight tremor shook her, which he did not notice.
“Yes, dear,” she said. “I allow that Combers have had for many generations a sort of acquisitive cunning, for all we possess has come to us by exceedingly prudent marriages. They have also—I am an exception here—the gift of not saying very much, which certainly has an impressive effect, even when it arises from not having very much to say. They are sticky; they attract wealth, and they have the force called vis inertiae, which means that they invest their money prudently. You should hear Tony—well, perhaps you had better not hear Tony. But now here is Michael showing that he has got tastes. Can you wonder that I’m delighted? And not only has he got tastes, but he has the strength of character to back them. Michael, in the Guards too! It was a perfect farce, and he’s had the sense to see it. He hated his duties, and he hated his diversions. Now Francis—”
“I am afraid Michael has always been a little jealous of Francis,” remarked his father.
This roused Barbara; she spoke quite seriously:
“If you really think that, my dear,” she said, “you have the distinction of being the worst possible judge of character that the world has ever known. Michael might be jealous of anybody else, for the poor boy feels his physical awkwardness most sensitively, but Francis is just the one person he really worships. He would do anything in the world for him.”
The discussion with Barbara was being even more fruitless than that with his wife, and Lord Ashbridge rose.
“All I can do, then, is to ask you not to back Michael up,” he said.
“My dear, he won’t need backing up. He’s a match for you by himself. But if Michael, after thoroughly worsting you, asks me my opinion, I shall certainly give it him. But he won’t ask my opinion first. He will strew your limbs, Robert, over this delightful terrace.”
“Michael’s train is late,” said Lady Ashbridge, hearing the stable clock strike. “He should have been here before this.”
Barbara had still a word to say, and disregarded this quencher.
“But don’t think, Robert,” she said, “that because Michael resists your wishes and authority, he will be enjoying himself. He will hate doing it, but that will not stop him.”
Lord Ashbridge was not a bully; he had merely a profound sense of his own importance.
“We will see about resistance,” he said.
Barbara was not so successful on this occasion, and exploded loudly:
“You will, dear, indeed,” she said.
Michael meantime had been travelling down from London without perturbing himself over the scene with his father which he knew lay before him. This was quite characteristic of him; he had a singular command over his imagination when he had made up his mind to anything, and never indulged in the gratuitous pain of anticipation. Today he had an additional bulwark against such self-inflicted worries, for he had spent his last two hours in town at the vocal recital of a singer who a month before had stirred the critics into rhapsody over her gift of lyric song. Up till now he had had no opportunity of hearing her; and, with the panegyrics that had been showered on her in his mind, he had gone with the expectation of disappointment. But now, an hour afterwards, the wheels of the train sang her songs, and in the inward ear he could recapture, with the vividness of an hallucination, the timbre of that wonderful voice and also the sweet harmonies of the pianist who accompanied her.
The hall had been packed from end to end, and he had barely got to his seat, the only one vacant in the whole room, when Miss Sylvia Falbe appeared, followed at once by her accompanist, whose name occurred nowhere on the programme. Two neighbours, however, who chatted shrilly during the applause that greeted them, informed him that this was Hermann, “dear Hermann; there is no one like him!” But it occurred to Michael that the singer was like him, though she was fair and he dark. But his perception of either of them visually was but vague; he had come to hear and not to see. Neither she nor Hermann had any music with them, and Hermann just glanced at the programme, which he put down on the top of the piano, which, again unusually, was open. Then without pause they began the set of German songs—Brahms, Schubert, Schumann—with which the recital opened. And for one moment, before he lost himself in the ecstasy of hearing, Michael found himself registering the fact that Sylvia Falbe had one of the most charming faces he had ever seen. The next he was swallowed up in melody.
She had the ease of the consummate artist, and each note, like the gates of the New Jerusalem, was a pearl, round and smooth and luminous almost, so that it was as if many-coloured light came from her lips. Nor was that all; it seemed as if the accompaniment was made by the song itself, coming into life with the freshness of the dawn of its creation; it was impossible to believe that one mind directed the singer and another the pianist, and if the voice was an example of art in excelsis, not less exalted was the perfection of the player. Not for a moment through the song did he take his eyes off her; he looked at her with an intensity of gaze that seemed to be reading the emotion with which the lovely melody filled her. For herself, she looked straight out over the hall, with grey eyes half-closed, and mouth that in the pauses of her song was large and full-lipped, generously curving, and face that seemed lit with the light of the morning she sang of. She was the song; Michael thought of her as just that, and the pianist who watched and understood her so unerringly was the song, too. They had for him no identity of their own; they were as remote from everyday life as the mind of Schumann which they made so vivid. It was then that they existed.
The last song of the group she sang in English, for it was “Who is Sylvia?” There was a buzz of smiles and whispers among the front row in the pause before it, and regaining her own identity for a moment, she smiled at a group of her friends among whom clearly it was a cliche species of joke that she should ask who Sylvia was, and enumerate her merits, when all the time she was Sylvia. Michael felt rather impatient at this; she was not anybody just now but a singer. And then came the divine inevitable simplicity of perfect words and the melody preordained for them. The singer, as he knew, was German, but she had no trace of foreign accent. It seemed to him that this was just one miracle the more; she had become English because she was singing what Shakespeare wrote.
The next group, consisting of modern French songs, appeared to Michael utterly unworthy of the singer and the echoing piano. If you had it in you to give reality to great and simple things, it was surely a waste to concern yourself with these little morbid, melancholy manikins, these marionettes. But his emotions being unoccupied he attended more to the manner of the performance, and in especial to the marvellous technique, not so much of the singer, but of the pianist who caused the rain to fall and the waters reflect the toneless grey skies. He had never, even when listening to the great masters, heard so flawless a comprehension as this anonymous player, incidentally known as Hermann, exhibited. As far as mere manipulation went, it was, as might perhaps be expected, entirely effortless, but effortless no less was the understanding of the music. It happened. . . . It was like that.
All of this so filled Michael’s mind as he travelled down that evening to Ashbridge, that he scarcely remembered the errand on which he went, and when it occurred to him it instantly sank out of sight again, lost in the recollection of the music which he had heard to-day and which belonged to the art that claimed the allegiance of his soul. The rattle of the wheels was alchemised into song, and as with half-closed eyes he listened to it, there swam across it now the full face of the singer, now the profile of the pianist, that had stood out white and intent against the dark panelling behind his head. He had gleaned one fact at the box-office as he hurried out to catch his train: this Hermann was the singer’s brother, a teacher of the piano in London, and apparently highly thought of.
CHAPTER III
Michael’s train, as his mother had so infallibly pronounced, was late, and he had arrived only just in time to hurry to his room and dress quickly, in order not to add to his crimes the additional one of unpunctuality, for unpunctuality, so Lord Ashbridge held, was the politeness not only of kings, but of all who had any pretence to decent breeding. His father gave him a carefully-iced welcome, his mother the tip of her long, camel-like lips, and they waited solemnly for the appearance of Aunt Barbara, who, it would seem, had forfeited her claims to family by her marriage. A man-servant and a half looked after each of them at dinner, and the twelve Lord Ashbridges in uniform looked down from their illuminated frames on their degenerate descendant.
The only bright spot in this portentous banquet was Aunt Barbara, who had chosen that evening, with what intention may possibly be guessed, to put on an immense diamond tiara and a breastplate of rubies, while Og, after one futile attempt to play with the footmen, yielded himself up to the chilling atmosphere of good breeding, and ate his mutton-chops with great composure. But Aunt Barbara, fortified by her gems, ate an excellent dinner, and talked all the time with occasional bursts of unexplained laughter.
Afterwards, when Michael was left alone with his father, he found that his best efforts at conversation elicited only monosyllabic replies, and at last, in the despairing desire to bring things to a head, he asked him if he had received his letter. An affirmative monosyllable, followed by the hissing of Lord Ashbridge’s cigarette end as he dropped it into his coffee cup, answered him, and he perceived that the approaching storm was to be rendered duly impressive by the thundery stillness that preceded it. Then his father rose, and as he passed Michael, who held the door open for him, said:
“If you can spare the time, Michael, I would like to have a talk with you when your mother and aunt have gone to bed.”
That was not very long delayed; Michael imagined that Aunt Barbara must have had a hint, for before half-past ten she announced with a skilfully suppressed laugh that she was about to retire, and kissed Michael affectionately. Both her laugh and her salute were encouraging; he felt that he was being backed up. Then a procession of footmen came into the room bearing lemonade and soda water and whiskey and a plate of plain biscuits, and the moment after he was alone with his father.
Lord Ashbridge rose and walked, very tall and majestic, to the fireplace, where he stood for a moment with his back to his son. Then he turned round.
“Now about this nonsense of your resigning your commission, Michael,” he said. “I don’t propose to argue about it, and I am just going to tell you. If, as you have informed me, you have actually sent it in, you will write to-morrow with due apologies and ask that it may be withdrawn. I will see your letter before you send it.”
Michael had intended to be as quiet and respectful as possible, consistent with firmness, but a sentence here gave him a spasm of anger.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he said, “by saying ‘if I have sent it in.’ You have received my letter in which I tell you that I have done so.”
Already, even at the first words, there was bad blood between them. Michael’s face had clouded with that gloom which his father would certainly call sulky, and for himself he resented the tone of Michael’s reply. To make matters worse he gave his little falsetto cackle, which no doubt was intended to convey the impression of confident good humour. But there was, it must be confessed, very little good humour about it, though he still felt no serious doubt about the result of this interview.
“I’m afraid, perhaps, then, that I did not take your letter quite seriously, my dear Michael,” he said, in the bantering tone that froze Michael’s cordiality completely up. “I glanced through it; I saw a lot of nonsense—or so it struck me—about your resigning your commission and studying music; I think you mentioned Baireuth, and settling down in London afterwards.”
“Yes. I said all that,” said Michael. “But you make a mistake if you do not see that it was written seriously.”
His father glanced across at him, where he sat with his heavy, plain face, his long arms and short legs, and the sight merely irritated him. With his passion for convention (and one of the most important conventions was that Combers should be fine, strapping, normal people) he hated the thought that it was his son who presented that appearance. And his son’s mind seemed to him at this moment as ungainly as his person. Again, very unwisely, he laughed, still thinking to carry this off by the high hand.
“Yes, but I can’t take that rubbish seriously,” he said. “I am asking your permission now to inquire, without any nonsense, into what you mean.”
Michael frowned. He felt the insincerity of his father’s laugh, and rebelled against the unfairness of it. The question, he knew well, was sarcastically asked, the flavour of irony in the “permission to inquire” was not there by accident. To speak like that implied contempt of his opposition; he felt that he was being treated like a child over some nursery rebellion, in which, subsequently, there is no real possibility of disobedience. He felt his anger rising in spite of himself.
“If you refer to it as rubbish, sir, there is the end of the matter.”
“Ah! I thought we should soon agree,” said Lord Ashbridge, chuckling.
“You mistake me,” said Michael. “There is the end of the matter, because I won’t discuss it any more, if you treat me like this. I will say good night, if you intend to persist in the idea that you can just brush my resolves away like that.”
This clearly took his father aback; it was a perfectly dignified and proper attitude to take in the face of ridicule, and Lord Ashbridge, though somewhat an adept at the art of self-deception—as, for instance, when he habitually beat the golf professional—could not disguise from himself that his policy had been to laugh and blow away Michael’s absurd ideas. But it was abundantly clear at this moment that this apparently easy operation was out of his reach.
He got up with more amenity in his manner than he had yet shown, and laid his hand on Michael’s shoulder as he stood in front of him, evidently quite prepared to go away.
“Come, my dear Michael. This won’t do,” he said. “I thought it best to treat your absurd schemes with a certain lightness, and I have only succeeded in irritating you.”
Michael was perfectly aware that he had scored. And as his object was to score he made another criticism.
“When you say ‘absurd schemes,’ sir,” he said, with quiet respect, “are you not still laughing at them?”
Lord Ashbridge again retreated strategically.
“Very well; I withdraw absurd,” he said. “Now sit down again, and we will talk. Tell me what is in your mind.”
Michael made a great effort with himself. He desired, in the secret, real Michael, to be reasonable and cordial, to behave filially, while all the time his nerves were on edge with his father’s ridicule, and with his instinctive knowledge of his father’s distaste for him.
“Well, it’s like this, father,” he said. “I’m doing no good as I am. I went into the Guards, as you know, because it was the right thing to do. A business man’s son is put into business for the same reason. And I’m not good at it.”
Michael paused a moment.
“My heart isn’t in it,” he said, “and I dislike it. It seems to me useless. We’re for show. And my heart is quite entirely in music. It’s the thing I care for more than anything else.”
Again he paused; all that came so easily to his tongue when he was speaking to Francis was congealed now when he felt the contempt with which, though unexpressed, he knew he inspired his father.
Lord Ashbridge waited with careful politeness, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his large person completely filling his chair, just as his atmosphere filled the room. He said nothing at all until the silence rang in Michael’s ears.
“That is all I can tell you,” he said at length.
Lord Ashbridge carefully conveyed the ash from his cigarette to the fireplace before he spoke. He felt that the time had come for his most impressive effort.
“Very well, then, listen to me,” he said. “What you suffer from, Michael, is a mere want of self-confidence and from modesty. You don’t seem to grasp—I have often noticed this—who you are and what your importance is—an importance which everybody is willing to recognise if you will only assume it. You have the privileges of your position, which you don’t sufficiently value, but you have, also, the responsibilities of it, which I am afraid you are inclined to shirk. You haven’t got the large view; you haven’t the sense of patriotism. There are a great many things in my position—the position into which you will step—which I would much sooner be without. But we have received a tradition, and we are bound to hand it on intact. You may think that this has nothing to do with your being in the Guards, but it has. We”—and he seemed to swell a little—“we are bound in honour to take the lead in the service of our country, and we must do it whether we like it or not. We have to till, with our own efforts, ‘our goodly heritage.’ You have to learn the meaning of such words as patriotism, and caste, and duty.”
Lord Ashbridge thought that he was really putting this very well indeed, and he had the sustaining consciousness of sincerity. He entirely believed what he said, and felt that it must carry conviction to anyone who listened to it with anything like an open mind. The only thing that he did not allow for was that he personally immensely enjoyed his social and dominant position, thinking it indeed the only position which was really worth having. This naturally gave an aid to comprehension, and he did not take into account that Michael was not so blessed as he, and indeed lacked this very superior individual enlightenment. But his own words kindled the flame of this illumination, and without noticing the blank stolidity of Michael’s face he went on with gathering confidence:
“I am sure you are high-minded, my dear Michael,” he said. “And it is to your high-mindedness that I—yes, I don’t mind saying it—that I appeal. In a moment of unreflectiveness you have thrown overboard what I am sure is real to you, the sense, broadly speaking, that you are English and of the highest English class, and have intended to devote yourself to more selfish and pleasure-loving aims, and to dwell in a tinkle of pleasant sounds that please your ear; and I’m sure I don’t wonder, because, as your mother and I both know, you play charmingly. But I feel confident that your better mind does not really confuse the mere diversions of life with its serious issues.”
Michael suddenly rose to his feet.
“Father, I’m afraid this is no use at all,” he said. “All that I feel, and all that I can’t say, I know is unintelligible to you. You have called it rubbish once, and you think it is rubbish still.”
Lord Ashbridge’s eloquence was suddenly arrested. He had been cantering gleefully along, and had the very distinct impression of having run up against a stone wall. He dismounted, hurt, but in no way broken.
“I am anxious to understand you, Michael,” he said.
“Yes, father, but you don’t,” said he. “You have been explaining me all wrong. For instance, I don’t regard music as a diversion. That is the only explanation there is of me.”
“And as regards my wishes and my authority?” asked his father.
Michael squared his shoulders and his mind.
“I am exceedingly sorry to disappoint you in the matter of your wishes,” he said; “but in the matter of your authority I can’t recognise it when the question of my whole life is at stake. I know that I am your son, and I want to be dutiful, but I have my own individuality as well. That only recognises the authority of my own conscience.”
That seemed to Lord Ashbridge both tragic and ludicrous. Completely subservient himself to the conventions which he so much enjoyed, it was like the defiance of a child to say such things. He only just checked himself from laughing again.
“I refuse to take that answer from you,” he said.
“I have no other to give you,” said Michael. “But I should like to say once more that I am sorry to disobey your wishes.”
The repetition took away his desire to laugh. In fact, he could not have laughed.
“I don’t want to threaten you, Michael,” he said. “But you may know that I have a very free hand in the disposal of my property.”
“Is that a threat?” asked Michael.
“It is a hint.”
“Then, father, I can only say that I should be perfectly satisfied with anything you may do,” said Michael. “I wish you could leave everything you have to Francis. I tell you in all sincerity that I wish he had been my elder brother. You would have been far better pleased with him.”
Lord Ashbridge’s anger rose. He was naturally so self-complacent as to be seldom disposed to anger, but its rarity was not due to kindliness of nature.
“I have before now noticed your jealousy of your cousin,” he observed.
Michael’s face went white.
“That is infamous and untrue, father,” he said.
Lord Ashbridge turned on him.
“Apologise for that,” he said.
Michael looked up at his high towering without a tremor.
“I wait for the withdrawal of your accusation that I am jealous of Francis,” he replied.
There was a dead silence. Lord Ashbridge stood there in swollen and speechless indignation, and Michael faced him undismayed. . . . And then suddenly to the boy there came an impulse of pure pity for his father’s disappointment in having a son like himself. He saw with the candour which was so real a part of him how hopeless it must be, to a man of his father’s mind, to have a millstone like himself unalterably bound round his neck, fit to choke and drown him.
“Indeed, I am not jealous of Francis, father,” he said, “and I speak quite truthfully when I say how I sympathise with you in having a son like me. I don’t want to vex you. I want to make the best of myself.”
Lord Ashbridge stood looking exactly like his statue in the market-place at Ashbridge.
“If that is the case, Michael,” he said, “it is within your power. You will write the letter I spoke about.”
Michael paused a moment as if waiting for more. It did not seem to him possible that his appeal should bear no further fruit than that. But it was soon clear that there was no more to come.
“I will wish you good night, father,” he said.
Sunday was a day on which Lord Ashbridge was almost more himself than during the week, so shining and public an example did he become of the British nobleman. Instead of having breakfast, according to the middle-class custom, rather later than usual, that solid sausagy meal was half an hour earlier, so that all the servants, except those whose presence in the house was imperatively necessary for purposes of lunch, should go to church. Thus “Old George” and Lord Ashbridge’s private boat were exceedingly busy for the half-hour preceding church time, the last boat-load holding the family, whose arrival was the signal for service to begin. Lady Ashbridge, however, always went on earlier, for she presided at the organ with the long, camel-like back turned towards the congregation, and started playing a slow, melancholy voluntary when the boy who blew the bellows said to her in an ecclesiastical whisper: “His lordship has arrived, my lady.” Those of the household who could sing (singing being construed in the sense of making a loud and cheerful noise in the throat) clustered in the choir-pews near the organ, while the family sat in a large, square box, with a stove in the centre, amply supplied with prayer-books of the time when even Protestants might pray for Queen Caroline. Behind them, separated from the rest of the church by an ornamental ironwork grille, was the Comber chapel, in which antiquarians took nearly as much pleasure as Lord Ashbridge himself. Here reclined a glorious company of sixteenth century knights, with their honourable ladies at their sides, unyielding marble bolsters at their heads, and grotesque dogs at their feet. Later, when their peerage was conferred, they lost a little of their yeoman simplicity, and became peruked and robed and breeched; one, indeed, in the age of George III., who was blessed with poetical aspirations, appeared in bare feet and a Roman toga with a scroll of manuscript in his hand; while later again, mere tablets on the walls commemorated their almost uncanny virtues.
And just on the other side of the grille, but a step away, sat the present-day representatives of the line, while Lady Ashbridge finished the last bars of her voluntary, Lord Ashbridge himself and his sister, large and smart and comely, and Michael beside them, short and heavy, with his soul full of the aspirations his father neither could nor cared to understand. According to his invariable custom, Lord Ashbridge read the lessons in a loud, sonorous voice, his large, white hands grasping the wing-feathers of the brass eagle, and a great carnation in his buttonhole; and when the time came for the offertory he put a sovereign in the open plate himself, and proceeded with his minuet-like step to go round the church and collect the gifts of the encouraged congregation. He followed all the prayers in his book, he made the responses in a voice nearly as loud as that in which he read the lessons; he sang the hymns with a curious buzzing sound, and never for a moment did he lose sight of the fact that he was the head of the Comber family, doing his duty as the custom of the Combers was, and setting an example of godly piety. Afterwards, as usual, he would change his black coat, eat a good lunch, stroll round the gardens (for he had nothing to say to golf on Sunday), and in the evening the clergyman would dine with him, and would be requested to say grace both before and after the meal. He knew exactly the proper mode of passing the Sunday for the landlord on his country estate, and when Lord Ashbridge knew that a thing was proper he did it with invariable precision.
Michael, of course, was in disgrace; his father, pending some further course of action, neither spoke to him nor looked at him; indeed, it seemed doubtful whether he would hand him the offertory plate, and it was perhaps a pity that he unbent even to this extent, for Michael happened to have none of the symbols of thankfulness about his person, and he saw a slight quiver pass through Aunt Barbara’s hymn-book. After a rather portentous lunch, however, there came some relief, for his father did not ask his company on the usual Sunday afternoon stroll, and Aunt Barbara never walked at all unless she was obliged. In consequence, when the thunderstorm had stepped airily away across the park, Michael joined her on the terrace, with the intention of talking the situation over with her.
Aunt Barbara was perfectly willing to do this, and she opened the discussion very pleasantly with peals of laughter.
“My dear, I delight in you,” she said; “and altogether this is the most entertaining day I have ever spent here. Combers are supposed to be very serious, solid people, but for unconscious humour there isn’t a family in England or even in the States to compare with them. Our lunch just now; if you could put it into a satirical comedy called The Aristocracy it would make the fortune of any theatre.”
A dawning smile began to break through Michael’s tragedy face.
“I suppose it was rather funny,” he said. “But really I’m wretched about it, Aunt Barbara.”
“My dear, what is there to be wretched about? You might have been wretched if you had found you couldn’t stand up to your father, but I gather, though I know nothing directly, that you did. At least, your mother has said to me three times, twice on the way to church and once coming back: ‘Michael has vexed his father very much.’ And the offertory plate, my dear, and, as I was saying, lunch! I am in disgrace too, because I said perfectly plainly yesterday that I was on your side; and there we were at lunch, with your father apparently unable to see either you or me, and unconscious of our presence. Fancy pretending not to see me! You can’t help seeing me, a large, bright object like me! And what will happen next? That’s what tickles me to death, as they say on my side of the Atlantic. Will he gradually begin to perceive us again, like objects looming through a fog, or shall we come into view suddenly, as if going round a corner? And you are just as funny, my dear, with your long face, and air of depressed determination. Why be heavy, Michael? So many people are heavy, and none of them can tell you why.”
It was impossible not to feel the unfreezing effect of this. Michael thawed to it, as he would have thawed to Francis.
“Perhaps they can’t help it, Aunt Barbara,” he said. “At least, I know I can’t. I really wish I could learn how to. I—I don’t see the funny side of things till it is pointed out. I thought lunch a sort of hell, you know. Of course, it was funny, his appearing not to see either of us. But it stands for more than that; it stands for his complete misunderstanding of me.”
Aunt Barbara had the sense to see that the real Michael was speaking. When people were being unreal, when they were pompous or adopting attitudes, she could attend to nothing but their absurdity, which engrossed her altogether. But she never laughed at real things; real things were not funny, but were facts.
“He quite misunderstands,” went on Michael, with the eagerness with which the shy welcome comprehension. “He thinks I can make my mind like his if I choose; and if I don’t choose, or rather can’t choose, he thinks that his wishes, his authority, should be sufficient to make me act as if it was. Well, I won’t do that. He may go on,”—and that pleasant smile lit up Michael’s plain face—“he may go on being unaware of my presence as long as he pleases. I am very sorry it should be so, but I can’t help it. And the worst of it is, that opposition of that sort—his sort—makes me more determined than ever.”
Aunt Barbara nodded.
“And your friends?” she asked. “What will they think?”
Michael looked at her quite simply and directly.
“Friends?” he said. “I haven’t got any.”
“Ah, my dear, that’s nonsense!” she said.
“I wish it was. Oh, Francis is a friend, I know. He thinks me an odd old thing, but he likes me. Other people don’t. And I can’t see why they should. I’m sure it’s my fault. It’s because I’m heavy. You said I was, yourself.”
“Then I was a great ass,” remarked Aunt Barbara. “You wouldn’t be heavy with people who understood you. You aren’t heavy with me, for instance; but, my dear, lead isn’t in it when you are with your father.”
“But what am I to do, if I’m like that?” asked the boy.
She held up her large, fat hand, and marked the points off on her fingers.
“Three things,” she said. “Firstly, get away from people who don’t understand you, and whom, incidentally, you don’t understand. Secondly, try to see how ridiculous you and everybody else always are; and, thirdly, which is much the most important, don’t think about yourself. If I thought about myself I should consider how old and fat and ugly I am. I’m not ugly, really; you needn’t be foolish and tell me so. I should spoil my life by trying to be young, and only eating devilled codfish and drinking hot plum-juice, or whatever is the accepted remedy for what we call obesity. We’re all odd old things, as you say. We can only get away from that depressing fact by doing something, and not thinking about ourselves. We can all try not to be egoists. Egoism is the really heavy quality in the world.”
She paused a moment in this inspired discourse and whistled to Og, who had stretched his weary limbs across a bed of particularly fine geraniums.
“There!” she said, pointing, “if your dog had done that, you would be submerged in depression at the thought of how vexed your father would be. That would be because you are thinking of the effect on yourself. As it’s my dog that has done it—dear me, they do look squashed now he has got up—you don’t really mind about your father’s vexation, because you won’t have to think about yourself. That is wise of you; if you were a little wiser still, you would picture to yourself how ridiculous I shall look apologising for Og. Kindly kick him, Michael; he will understand. Naughty! And as for your not having any friends, that would be exceedingly sad, if you had gone the right way to get them and failed. But you haven’t. You haven’t even gone among the people who could be your friends. Your friends, broadly speaking, must like the same sort of things as you. There must be a common basis. You can’t even argue with somebody, or disagree with somebody unless you have a common ground to start from. If I say that black is white, and you think it is blue, we can’t get on. It leads nowhere. And, finally—”
She turned round and faced him directly.
“Finally, don’t be so cross, my dear,” she said.
“But am I?” asked he.
“Yes. You don’t know it, or else probably, since you are a very decent fellow, you wouldn’t be. You expect not to be liked, and that is cross of you. A good-humoured person expects to be liked, and almost always is. You expect not to be understood, and that’s dreadfully cross. You think your father doesn’t understand you; no more he does, but don’t go on thinking about it. You think it is a great bore to be your father’s only son, and wish Francis was instead. That’s cross; you may think it’s fine, but it isn’t, and it is also ungrateful. You can have great fun if you will only be good-tempered!”
“How did you know that—about Francis, I mean?” asked Michael.
“Does it happen to be true? Of course it does. Every cross young man wishes he was somebody else.”
“No, not quite that,” began Michael.
“Don’t interrupt. It is sufficiently accurate. And you think about your appearance, my dear. It will do quite well. You might have had two noses, or only one eye, whereas you have two rather jolly ones. And do try to see the joke in other people, Michael. You didn’t see the joke in your interview last night with your father. It must have been excruciatingly funny. I don’t say it wasn’t sad and serious as well. But it was funny too; there were points.”
Michael shook his head.
“I didn’t see them,” he said.
“But I should have, and I should have been right. All dignity is funny, simply because it is sham. When dignity is real, you don’t know it’s dignity. But your father knew he was being dignified, and you knew you were being dignified. My dear, what a pair of you!”
Michael frowned.
“But is nothing serious, then?” he asked. “Surely it was serious enough last night. There was I in rank rebellion to my father, and it vexed him horribly; it did more, it grieved him.”
She laid her hand on Michael’s knee.
“As if I didn’t know that!” she said. “We’re all sorry for that, though I should have been much sorrier if you had given in and ceased to vex him. But there it is! Accept that, and then, my dear, swiftly apply yourself to perceive the humour of it. And now, about your plans!”
“I shall go to Baireuth on Wednesday, and then on to Munich,” began Michael.
“That, of course. Perhaps you may find the humour of a Channel crossing. I look for it in vain. Yet I don’t know. . . . The man who puts on a yachting-cap, and asks if there’s a bit of a sea on. It proves to be the case, and he is excessively unwell. I must look out for him next time I cross. And then?”
“Then I shall settle in town and study. Oh, here’s my father coming home.”
Lord Ashbridge approached down the terrace. He stopped for a moment at the desecrated geranium bed, saw the two sitting together, and turned at right angles and went into the house. Almost immediately a footman came out with a long dog-lead and advanced hesitatingly to Og. Og was convinced that he had come to play with him, and crouched and growled and retreated and advanced with engaging affability. Out of the windows of the library looked Lord Ashbridge’s baleful face. . . . Aunt Barbara swayed out of her chair, and laid a trembling hand on Michael’s shoulder.
“I shall go and apologise for Og,” she said. “I shall do it quite sincerely, my dear. But there are points.”
CHAPTER IV
Michael practised a certain mature and rather elderly precision in the ordinary affairs of daily life. His habits were almost unduly tidy and punctual; he answered letters by return of post, he never mislaid things nor tore up documents which he particularly desired should be preserved; he kept his gold in a purse and his change in a trousers-pocket, and in matters of travelling he always arrived at stations with plenty of time to spare, and had such creature comforts as he desired for his journey in a neat Gladstone bag above his head. He never travelled first-class, for the very simple and adequate reason that, though very well off, he preferred to spend his money in ways that were more productive of usefulness or pleasure; and thus, when he took his place in the corner of a second-class compartment of the Dover-Ostend express on the Wednesday morning following, he was the only occupant of it.
Probably he had never felt so fully at liberty, nor enjoyed a keener zest for life and the future. For the first time he had asserted his own indisputable right to stand on his own feet, and though he was genuinely sorry for his father’s chagrin at not being able to tuck him up in the family coach, his own sense of independence could not but wave its banners. There had been a second interview, no less fruitless than the first, and Lord Ashbridge had told him that when next his presence was desired at home, he would be informed of the fact. His mother had cried in a mild, trickling fashion, but it was quite obvious that in her heart of hearts she was more concerned with a bilious attack of peculiar intensity that had assailed Petsy. She wished Michael would not be so disobedient and vex his father, but she was quite sure that before long some formula, in diplomatic phrase, would be found on which reconciliation could be based; whereas it was highly uncertain whether any formula could be found that would produce the desired effect on Petsy, whose illness she attributed to the shock of Og’s sudden and disconcerting appearance on Saturday, when all Petsy’s nervous force was required to digest the copious cream. Consequently, though she threw reproachful glances at Michael, those directed at Barbara, who was the cause of the acuter tragedy, were pointed with more penetrating blame. Indeed, it is questionable whether Lady Ashbridge would have cried at all over Michael’s affairs had not Petsy’s also been in so lamentable and critical a state.
Just as the train began to move out of the station a young man rushed across the platform, eluded the embrace of the guard who attempted to stop him with amazing agility, and jumped into Michael’s compartment. He slammed the door after him, and leaned out, apparently looking for someone, whom he soon saw.
“Just caught it, Sylvia,” he shouted. “Send on my luggage, will you? It’s in the taxi still, I think, and I haven’t paid the man. Good-bye, darling.”
He waved to her till the curving line took the platform out of sight, and then sat down with a laugh, and eyes of friendly interest for Michael.
“Narrow squeak, wasn’t it?” he said gleefully. “I thought the guard had collared me. And I should have missed Parsifal.”
Michael had recognised him at once as he rushed across the platform; his shouting to Sylvia had but confirmed the recognition; and here on the day of his entering into his new kingdom of liberty was one of its citizens almost thrown into his arms. But for the moment his old invincible habit of shyness and sensitiveness forbade any responsive lightness of welcome, and he was merely formal, merely courteous.
“And all your luggage left behind,” he said. “Won’t you be dreadfully uncomfortable?”
“Uncomfortable? Why?” asked Falbe. “I shall buy a handkerchief and a collar every day, and a shirt and a pair of socks every other day till it arrives.”
Michael felt a sudden, daring impulse. He remembered Aunt Barbara’s salutary remarks about crossness being the equivalent of thinking about oneself. And the effort that it cost him may be taken as the measure of his solitary disposition.
“But you needn’t do that,” he said, “if—if you will be good enough to borrow of me till your things come.”
He blurted it out awkwardly, almost brusquely, and Falbe looked slightly amused at this wholly surprising offer of hospitality.
“But that’s awfully good of you,” he said, laughing and saying nothing direct about his acceptance. “It implies, too, that you are going to Baireuth. We travel together, then, I hope, for it is dismal work travelling alone, isn’t it? My sister tells me that half my friends were picked up in railway carriages. Been there before?”
Michael felt himself lured from the ordinary aloofness of attitude and demeanour, which had been somewhat accustomed to view all strangers with suspicion. And yet, though till this moment he had never spoken to him, he could hardly regard Falbe as a stranger, for he had heard him say on the piano what his sister understood by the songs of Brahms and Schubert. He could not help glancing at Falbe’s hands, as they busied themselves with the filling and lighting of a pipe, and felt that he knew something of those long, broad-tipped fingers, smooth and white and strong. The man himself he found to be quite different to what he had expected; he had seen him before, eager and intent and anxious-faced, absorbed in the task of following another mind; now he looked much younger, much more boyish.
“No, it’s my first visit to Baireuth,” he said, “and I can’t tell you how excited I am about it. I’ve been looking forward to it so much that I almost expect to be disappointed.”
Falbe blew out a cloud of smoke and laughter.
“Oh, you’re safe enough,” he said. “Baireuth never disappoints. It’s one of the facts—a reliable fact. And Munich? Do you go to Munich afterwards?”
“Yes. I hope so.”
Falbe clicked with his tongue
“Lucky fellow,” he said. “How I wish I was. But I’ve got to get back again after my week. You’ll spend the mornings in the galleries, and the afternoons and evenings at the opera. O Lord, Munich!”
He came across from the other side of the carriage and sat next Michael, putting his feet up on the seat opposite.
“Talk of Munich,” he said. “I was born in Munich, and I happen to know that it’s the heavenly Jerusalem, neither more nor less.”
“Well, the heavenly Jerusalem is practically next door to Baireuth,” said Michael.
“I know; but it can’t be managed. However, there’s a week of unalloyed bliss between me now and the desolation of London in August. What is so maddening is to think of all the people who could go to Munich and don’t.”
Michael held debate within himself. He felt that he ought to tell his new acquaintance that he knew who he was, that, however trivial their conversation might be, it somehow resembled eavesdropping to talk to a chance fellow-passenger as if he were a complete stranger. But it required again a certain effort to make the announcement.
“I think I had better tell you,” he said at length, “that I know you, that I’ve listened to you at least, at your sister’s recital a few days ago.”
Falbe turned to him with the friendliest pleasure.
“Ah! were you there?” he asked. “I hope you listened to her, then, not to me. She sang well, didn’t she?”
“But divinely. At the same time I did listen to you, especially in the French songs. There was less song, you know.”
Falbe laughed.
“And more accompaniment!” he said. “Perhaps you play?”
Michael was seized with a fit of shyness at the idea of talking to Falbe about himself.
“Oh, I just strum,” he said.
Throughout the journey their acquaintanceship ripened; and casually, in dropped remarks, the two began to learn something about each other. Falbe’s command of English, as well as his sister’s, which was so complete that it was impossible to believe that a foreigner was speaking, was explained, for it came out that his mother was English, and that from infancy they had spoken German and English indiscriminately. His father, who had died some dozen years before, had been a singer of some note in his native land, but was distinguished more for his teaching than his practice, and it was he who had taught his daughter. Hermann Falbe himself had always intended to be a pianist, but the poverty in which they were left at his father’s death had obliged him to give lessons rather than devote himself to his own career; but now at the age of thirty he found himself within sight of the competence that would allow him to cut down his pupils, and begin to be a pupil again himself.
His sister, moreover, for whom he had slaved for years in order that she might continue her own singing education unchecked, was now more than able, especially after these last three months in London, where she had suddenly leaped into eminence, to support herself and contributed to the expenses of their common home. But there was still, so Michael gathered, no great superabundance of money, and he guessed that Falbe’s inability to go to Munich was due to the question of expense.
All this came out by inference and allusion rather than by direct information, while Michael, naturally reticent and feeling that his own uneventful affairs could have no interest for anybody, was less communicative. And, indeed, while shunning the appearance of inquisitiveness, he was far too eager to get hold of his new acquaintance to think of volunteering much himself. Here to him was this citizen of the new country who all his life had lived in the palace of art, and that in no dilettante fashion, but with set aim and serious purpose. And Falbe abounded in such topics; he knew the singers and the musicians of the world, and, which was much more than that, he was himself of them; humble, no doubt, in circumstances and achievement as yet, but clearly to Michael of the blood royal of artistry. That was the essential thing about him as regards his relations with his fellow-traveller, though, when next morning the spires of Cologne and the swift river of his Fatherland came into sight, he burst out into a sort of rhapsody of patriotism that mockingly covered a great sincerity.
“Ah! beloved land!” he cried. “Soil of heaven and of divine harmony! Hail to thee! Hail to thee! Rhine, Rhine deep and true and steadfast.” . . . And he waved his hat and sang the greeting of Brunnhilde. Then he turned laughingly to Michael.
“I am sufficiently English to know how ridiculous that must seem to you,” he said, “for I love England also, and the passengers on the boat would merely think me mad if I apostrophised the cliffs of Dover and the mud of the English roads. But here I am a German again, and I would willingly kiss the soil. You English—we English, I may say, for I am as much English as German—I believe have got the same feeling somewhere in our hearts, but we lock it up and hide it away. Pray God I shall never have to choose to which nation I belong, though for that matter there in no choice in it at all, for I am certainly a German subject. Guten Tag, Koln; let us instantly have our coffee. There is no coffee like German coffee, though the French coffee is undeniably pleasanter to the mere superficial palate. But it doesn’t touch the heart, as everything German touches my heart when I come back to the Fatherland.”
He chattered on in tremendous high spirits.
“And to think that to-night we shall sleep in true German beds,” he said. “I allow that the duvet is not so convenient as blankets, and that there is a watershed always up the middle of your bed, so that during the night your person descends to one side while the duvet rolls down the other; but it is German, which makes up for any trifling inconvenience. Baireuth, too; perhaps it will strike you as a dull and stinking little town, and so I dare say it is. But after lunch we shall go up the hillside to where the theatre stands, at the edge of the pine-woods, and from the porch the trumpets will give out the motif of the Grail, and we shall pass out of the heat into the cool darkness of the theatre. Aren’t you thrilled, Comber? Doesn’t a holy awe pervade you! Are you worthy, do you think?”
All this youthful, unrestrained enthusiasm was a revelation to Michael. Intentionally absurd as Falbe’s rhapsody on the Fatherland had been, Michael knew that it sprang from a solid sincerity which was not ashamed of expressing itself. Living, as he had always done, in the rather formal and reticent atmosphere of his class and environment, he would have thought this fervour of patriotism in an English mouth ridiculous, or, if persevered in, merely bad form. Yet when Falbe hailed the Rhine and the spires of Cologne, it was clear that there was no bad form about it at all. He felt like that; and, indeed, as Michael was beginning to perceive, he felt with a similar intensity on all subjects about which he felt at all. There was something of the same vivid quality about Aunt Barbara, but Aunt Barbara’s vividness was chiefly devoted to the hunt of the absurdities of her friends, and it was always the concretely ridiculous that she pursued. But this handsome, vital young man, with his eagerness and his welcome for the world, who had fallen with so delightful a cordiality into Michael’s company, had already an attraction for him of a sort he had never felt before.
Dimly, as the days went by, he began to conjecture that he who had never had a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, if not by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of his reserve, and let himself feel and let himself express. He could see how utterly different was Falbe’s general conception and practice of life from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation of strangers—Francis excepted—who moved about, busy with each other and with affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil, wholly alien to him. He was willing to grant that this alienation, this absence of comradeship which he had missed all his life, was of his own making, in so far as his shyness and sensitiveness were the cause of it; but in effect he had never yet had a friend, because he had never yet taken his shutters down, so to speak, or thrown his front door open. He had peeped out through chinks, and felt how lonely he was, but he had not given anyone a chance to get in.
Falbe, on the other hand, lived at his window, ready to hail the passer-by, even as he had hailed Michael, with cheerful words. There he lounged in his shirt-sleeves, you might say, with elbows on the window-sill; and not from politeness, but from good fellowship, from the fact that he liked people, was at home to everybody. He liked people; there was the key to it. And Michael, however much he might be capable of liking people, had up till now given them no sign of it. It really was not their fault if they had not guessed it.
Two days passed, on the first of which Parsifal was given, and on the second Meistersinger. On the third there was no performance, and the two young men had agreed to meet in the morning and drive out of the town to a neighbouring village among the hills, and spend the day there in the woods. Michael had looked forward to this day with extraordinary pleasure, but there was mingled with it a sort of agony of apprehension that Falbe would find him a very boring companion. But the precepts of Aunt Barbara came to his mind, and he reflected that the certain and sure way of proving a bore was to be taken up with the idea that he might be. And anyhow, Falbe had proposed the plan himself.
They lunched in a little restaurant near a forest-enclosed lake, and since the day was very hot, did no more than stroll up the hill for a hundred yards, where they would get some hint of breeze, and disposed themselves at length on the carpet of pine-needles. Through the thick boughs overhead the sunlight reached them only in specks and flakes, the wind was but as a distant sea in the branches, and Falbe rolled over on to his face, and sniffed at the aromatic leaves with the gusto with which he enjoyed all that was to him enjoyable.
“Ah; that’s good, that’s good!” he said. “How I love smells—clean, sharp smells like this. But they’ve got to be wild; you can’t tame a smell and put it on your handkerchief; it takes the life out of it. Do you like smells, Comber?”
“I—I really never thought about it,” said Michael.
“Think now, then, and tell me,” said Falbe. “If you consider, you know such a lot about me, and, as a matter of fact, I know nothing whatever about you. I know you like music—I know you like blue trout, because you ate so many of them at lunch to-day. But what else do I know about you? I don’t even know what you thought of Parsifal. No, perhaps I’m wrong there, because the fact that you’ve never mentioned it probably shows that you couldn’t. The symptom of not understanding anything about Parsifal is to talk about it, and say what a tremendous impression it has made on you.”
“Ah! you’ve guessed right there,” said Michael. “I couldn’t talk about it; there’s nothing to say about it, except that it is Parsifal.”
“That’s true. It becomes part of you, and you can’t talk of it any more than you can talk about your elbows and your knees. It’s one of the things that makes you. . . .”
He turned over on to his back, and laid his hands palm uppermost over his eyes.
“That’s part of the glory of it all,” he said; “that art and its emotions become part of you like the food you eat and the wine you drink. Art is always making us; it enters into our character and destiny. As long as you go on growing you assimilate, and thank God one’s mind or soul, or whatever you like to call it, goes on growing for a long time. I suppose the moment comes to most people when they cease to grow, when they become fixed and hard; and that is what we mean by being old. But till then you weave your destiny, or, rather, people and beauty weave it for you, as you’ll see the Norns weaving, and yet you never know what you are making. You make what you are, and you never are because you are always becoming. You must excuse me; but Germans are always metaphysicians, and they can’t help it.”
“Go on; be German,” said Michael.
“Lieber Gott! As if I could be anything else,” said Falbe, laughing. “We are the only nation which makes a science of experimentalism; we try everything, just as a puppy tries everything. It tries mutton bones, and match-boxes, and soap and boots; it tries to find out what its tail is for, and bites it till it hurts, on which it draws the conclusion that it is not meant to eat. Like all metaphysicians, too, and dealers in the abstract, we are intensely practical. Our passion for experimentalism is dictated by the firm object of using the knowledge we acquire. We are tremendously thorough; we waste nothing, not even time, whereas the English have an absolute genius for wasting time. Look at all your games, your sports, your athletics—I am being quite German now, and forgetting my mother, bless her!—they are merely devices for getting rid of the hours, and so not having to think. You hate thought as a nation, and we live for it. Music is thought; all art is thought; commercial prosperity is thought; soldiering is thought.”
“And we are a nation of idiots?” asked Michael.
“No; I didn’t say that. I should say you are a nation of sensualists. You value sensation above everything; you pursue the enjoyable. You are a nation of children who are always having a perpetual holiday. You go straying all over the world for fun, and annex it generally, so that you can have tiger-shooting in India, and lots of gold to pay for your tiger-shooting in Africa, and fur from Canada for your coats. But it’s all a game; not one man in a thousand in England has any idea of Empire.”
“Oh, I think you are wrong there,” said Michael. “You believe that only because we don’t talk about it. It’s—it’s like what we agreed about Parsifal. We don’t talk about it because it is so much part of us.”
Falbe sat up.
“I deny it; I deny it flatly,” he said. “I know where I get my power of foolish, unthinking enjoyment from, and it’s from my English blood. I rejoice in my English blood, because you are the happiest people on the face of the earth. But you are happy because you don’t think, whereas the joy of being German is that you do think. England is lying in the shade, like us, with a cigarette and a drink—I wish I had one—and a golf ball or the world with which she has been playing her game. But Germany is sitting up all night thinking, and every morning she gives an order or two.”
Michael supplied the cigarette.
“Do you mean she is thinking about England’s golf ball?” asked Michael.
“Why, of course she is! What else is there to think about?”
“Oh, it’s impossible that there should be a European war,” said Michael, “for that is what it will mean!”
“And why is a European war impossible?” demanded Falbe, lighting his cigarette.
“It’s simply unthinkable!”
“Because you don’t think,” he interrupted. “I can tell you that the thought of war is never absent for a single day from the average German mind. We are all soldiers, you see. We start with that. You start by being golfers and cricketers. But ‘der Tag’ is never quite absent from the German mind. I don’t say that all you golfers and cricketers wouldn’t make good soldiers, but you’ve got to be made. You can’t be a golfer one day and a soldier the next.”
Michael laughed.
“As for that,” he said, “I made an uncommonly bad soldier. But I am an even worse golfer. As for cricket—”
Falbe again interrupted.
“Ah, then at last I know two things about you,” he said. “You were a soldier and you can’t play golf. I have never known so little about anybody after three—four days. However, what is our proverb? ‘Live and learn.’ But it takes longer to learn than to live. Eh, what nonsense I talk.”
He spoke with a sudden irritation, and the laugh at the end of his speech was not one of amusement, but rather of mockery. To Michael this mood was quite inexplicable, but, characteristically, he looked about in himself for the possible explanation of it.
“But what’s the matter?” he asked. “Have I annoyed you somehow? I’m awfully sorry.”
Falbe did not reply for a moment.
“No, you’ve not annoyed me,” he said. “I’ve annoyed myself. But that’s the worst of living on one’s nerves, which is the penalty of Baireuth. There is no charge, so to speak, except for your ticket, but a collection is made, as happens at meetings, and you pay with your nerves. You must cancel my annoyance, please. If I showed it I did not mean to.”
Michael pondered over this.
“But I can’t leave it like that,” he said at length. “Was it about the possibility of war, which I said was unthinkable?”
Falbe laughed and turned on his elbow towards Michael.
“No, my dear chap,” he said. “You may believe it to be unthinkable, and I may believe it to be inevitable; but what does it matter what either of us believes? Che sara sara. It was quite another thing that caused me to annoy myself. It does not matter.”
Michael lay back on the soft slope.
“Yet I insist on knowing,” he said. “That is, I mean, if it is not private.”
Falbe lay quietly with his long fingers in the sediment of pine-needles.
“Well, then, as it is not private, and as you insist,” he said, “I will certainly tell you. Does it not strike you that you are behaving like an absolute stranger to me? We have talked of me and my home and my plans all the time since we met at Victoria Station, and you have kept complete silence about yourself. I know nothing of you, not who you are, or what you are, or what your flag is. You fly no flag, you proclaim no identity. You may be a crossing-sweeper, or a grocer, or a marquis for all I know. Of course, that matters very little; but what does matter is that never for a moment have you shown me not what you happen to be, but what you are. I’ve got the impression that you are something, that there’s a real ‘you’ in your inside. But you don’t let me see it. You send a polite servant to the door when I knock. Probably this sounds very weird and un-English to you. But to my mind it is much more weird to behave as you are behaving. Come out, can’t you. Let’s look at you.”
It was exactly that—that brusque, unsentimental appeal—that Michael needed. He saw himself at that moment, as Falbe saw him, a shelled and muffled figure, intangible and withdrawn, but observing, as it were, through eye-holes, and giving nothing in exchange for what he saw.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s quite true what you tell me. I’m like that. But it really has never struck me that anybody cared to know.”
Falbe ceased digging his excavation in the pine-needles and looked up on Michael.
“Good Lord, man!” he said; “people care if you’ll only allow them to. The indifference of other people is a false term for the secretiveness of oneself. How can they care, unless you let them know what there is to care for?”
“But I’m completely uninteresting,” said Michael.
“Yes; I’ll judge of that,” said Falbe.
Slowly, and with diffident pauses, Michael began to speak of himself, feeling at first as if he was undressing in public. But as he went on he became conscious of the welcome that his story received, though that welcome only expressed itself in perfectly unemotional monosyllables. He might be undressing, but he was undressing in front of a fire. He knew that he uncovered himself to no icy blast or contemptuous rain, as he had felt when, so few days before, he had spoken of himself and what he was to his father. There was here the common land of music to build upon, whereas to Lord Ashbridge that same soil had been, so to speak, the territory of the enemy. And even more than that, there was the instinct, the certain conviction that he was telling his tale to sympathetic ears, to which the mere fact that he was speaking of himself presupposed a friendly hearing. Falbe, he felt, wanted to know about him, regardless of the nature of his confessions. Had he said that he was an undetected kleptomaniac, Falbe would have liked to know, have been pleased at any tidings, provided only they were authentic. This seemed to reveal itself to him even as he spoke; it had been there waiting for him to claim it, lying there as in a poste restante, only ready for its owner.
At the end Falbe gave a long sigh.
“And why the devil didn’t you give me any hint of it before?” he asked.
“I didn’t think it mattered,” said Michael.
“Well, then, you are amazingly wrong. Good Lord, it’s about the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard. I didn’t know anybody could escape from that awful sort of prison-house in which our—I’m English now—in which our upper class immures itself. Yet you’ve done it. I take it that the thing is done now?”
“I’m not going back into the prison-house again, if you mean that,” said Michael.
“And will your father cut you off?” asked he.
“Oh, I haven’t the least idea,” said Michael.
“Aren’t you going to inquire?”
Michael hesitated.
“No, I’m sure I’m not,” he said. “I can’t do that. It’s his business. I couldn’t ask about what he had done, or meant to do. It’s a sort of pride, I suppose. He will do as he thinks proper, and when he has thought, perhaps he will tell me what he intends.”
“But, then, how will you live?” asked Falbe.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you that. I’ve got some money, quite a lot, I mean, from my grandmother. In some ways I rather wish I hadn’t. It would have been a proof of sincerity to have become poor. That wouldn’t have made the smallest difference to my resolution.”
Falbe laughed.
“And so you are rich, and yet go second-class,” he said. “If I were rich I would make myself exceedingly comfortable. I like things that are good to eat and soft to touch. But I’m bound to say that I get on quite excellently without them. Being poor does not make the smallest difference to one’s happiness, but only to the number of one’s pleasures.”
Michael paused a moment, and then found courage to say what for the last two days he had been longing to give utterance to.
“I know; but pleasures are very nice things,” he said. “And doesn’t it seem obvious now that you are coming to Munich with me? It’s a purely selfish suggestion on my part. After being with you it will be very stupid to be alone there. But it would be so delightful if you would come.”
Falbe looked at him a moment without speaking, but Michael saw the light in his eyes.
“And what if I have my pride too?” he said. “Then I shall apologise for having made the proposal,” said Michael simply.
For just a second more Falbe hesitated. Then he held out his hand.
“I thank you most awfully,” he said. “I accept with the greatest pleasure.”
Michael drew a long breath of relief.
“I am glad,” he said. “So that’s settled. It’s really nice of you.”
The heat of the day was passing off, and over the sun-bleached plain the coolness of evening was beginning to steal. Overhead the wind stirred more resonantly in the pines, and in the bushes birds called to each other. Presently after, they rose from where they had lain all the afternoon and strolled along the needled slope to where, through a vista in the trees, they looked down on the lake and the hamlet that clustered near it. Down the road that wound through the trees towards it passed labourers going homeward from their work, with cheerful guttural cries to each other and a herd of cows sauntered by with bells melodiously chiming, taking leisurely mouthfuls from the herbage of the wayside. In the village, lying low in the clear dusk, scattered lights began to appear, the smoke of evening fires to ascend, and the aromatic odour of the burning wood strayed towards them up the wind.
Falbe, whose hand lay in the crook of Michael’s arm, pointed downwards to the village that lay there sequestered and rural.
“That’s Germany,” he said; “it’s that which lies at the back of every German heart. There lie the springs of the Rhine. It’s out of that originally that there came all that Germany stands for, its music, its poetry, its philosophy, its kultur. All flowed from these quiet uplands. It was here that the nation began to think and to dream. To dreamt! It’s out of dreams that all has sprung.”
He laughed.
“And then next week when we go to Munich, you will find me saying that this, this Athens of a town, with its museums and its galleries and its music, is Germany. I shall be right, too. Out of much dreaming comes the need to make. It is when the artist’s head and heart are full of his dreams that his hands itch for the palette or the piano. Nuremberg! Cannot we stop a few hours, at least, in Nuremberg, and see the meadow by the Pegnitz where the Meistersingers held their contest of song and the wooden, gabled house where Albrecht Durer lived? That will teach you Germany, too. The bud of their dream was opening then; and what flower, even in the magnificence of its full-blowing, is so lovely? Albrecht Durer, with his deep, patient eyes, and his patient hands with their unerring stroke; or Bach, with the fugue flowing from his brain through his quick fingers, making stars—stars fixed forever in the heaven of harmony! Don’t tell me that there is anything in the world more wonderful! We may have invented a few more instruments, we may have experimented with a few more combinations of notes, but in the B minor Mass, or in the music of the Passion, all is said. And all that came from the woods and the country and the quiet life in little towns, when the artist did his work because he loved it, and cared not one jot about what anybody else thought about it. We are a nation of thinkers and dreamers.”
Michael hesitated a moment.
“But you said not long ago that you were also the most practical nation,” he said. “You are a nation of soldiers, also.”
“And who would not willingly give himself for such a Fatherland?” said Falbe. “If need be, we will lay our lives down for that, and die more willingly than we have lived. God grant that the need comes not. But should it come we are ready. We are bound to be ready; it would be a crime not to be ready—a crime against the Fatherland. We love peace, but the peace-lovers are just those who in war are most terrible. For who are the backbone of war when war comes? The women of the country, my friend, not the ministers, not the generals and the admirals. I don’t say they make war, but when war is made they are the spirit of it, because, more than men, they love their homes. There is not a woman in Germany who will not send forth brother and husband and father and child, should the day come. But it will not come from our seeking.”
He turned to Michael, his face illuminated by the red glow of the sinking sun.
“Germany will rise as one man if she’s told to,” he said, “for that is what her unity and her discipline mean. She is patient and peaceful, but she is obedient.”
He pointed northwards.
“It is from there, from Prussia, from Berlin,” he said, “that the word will come, if they who rule and govern us, and in whose hands are all organisation and equipment, tell us that our national existence compels us to fight. They rule. The Prussians rule; there is no doubt of that. From Germany have come the arts, the sciences, the philosophies of the world, and not from there. But they guard our national life. It is they who watch by the Rhine for us, patient and awake. Should they beckon us one night, on some peaceful August night like this, when all seems so tranquil, so secure, we shall go. The silent beckoning finger will be obeyed from one end of the land to the other, from Poland on the east to France on the west.”
He turned away quickly.
“It does not bear thinking of,” he said; “and yet there are many, oh, so many, who night and day concern themselves with nothing else. Let us be English again, and not think of anything serious or unpleasant. Already, as you know, I am half English; there is something to build upon. Ah, and this is the sentimental hour, just when the sun begins to touch the horizon line of the stale, weary old earth and turns it into rosy gold and heals its troubles and its weariness. Schon, Schon!”
He stood for a moment bareheaded to the breeze, and made a great florid salutation to the sun, now only half-disk above the horizon.
“There! I have said my evensong,” he remarked, “like a good German, who always and always is ridiculous to the whole world, except those who are German also. Oh, I can see how we look to the rest of the world so well. Beer mug in one hand, and mouth full of sausage and song, and with the other hand, perhaps, fingering a revolver. How unreal it must seem to you, how affected, and yet how, in truth, you miss it all. Scratch a Russian, they say, and you find a Tartar; but scratch a German and you find two things—a sentimentalist and a soldier. Lieber Gott! No, I will say, Good God! I am English again, and if you scratch me you will find a golf ball.”
He took Michael’s arm again.
“Well, we’ve spent one day together,” he said, “and now we know something of who we are. I put this day in the bank; it’s mine or yours or both of ours. I won’t tell you how I’ve enjoyed it, or you will say that I have enjoyed it because I have talked almost all the time. But since it’s the sentimental hour I will tell you that you mistake. I have enjoyed it because I believe I have found a friend.”
CHAPTER V
Hermann Falbe had just gone back to his lodgings at the end of the Richard Wagner Strasse late on the night of their last day at Baireuth, and Michael, who had leaned out of his window to remind him of the hour of their train’s departure the next morning, turned back into the room to begin his packing. That was not an affair that would take much time, but since, on this sweltering August night, it would certainly be a process that involved the production of much heat, he made ready for bed first, and went about his preparations in pyjamas. The work of dropping things into a bag was soon over, and finding it impossible to entertain the idea of sleep, he drew one of the stiff, plush-covered arm-chairs to the window and slipped the rein from his thoughts, letting them gallop where they pleased.
In all his life he had never experienced so much sheer emotion as the last week had held for him. He had enjoyed his first taste of liberty; he had stripped himself naked to music; he had found a friend. Any one of these would have been sufficient to saturate him, and they had all, in the decrees of Fate, come together. His life hitherto had been like some dry sponge, dusty and crackling; now it was plunged in the waters of three seas, all incomparably sweet.
He had gained his liberty, and in that process he had forgotten about himself, the self which up till now had been so intolerable a burden. At school, and even before, when first the age of self-consciousness dawned upon him, he had seen himself as he believed others saw him—a queer, awkward, ill-made boy, slow at his work, shy with his fellows, incapable at games. Walled up in this fortress of himself, this gloomy and forbidding fastness, he had altogether failed to find the means of access to others, both to the normal English boys among whom his path lay, and also to his teachers, who, not unnaturally, found him sullen and unresponsive. There was no key among the rather limited bunches at their command which unlocked him, nor at home had anything been found which could fit his wards. It had been the business of school to turn out boys of certain received types. There was the clever boy, the athletic boy, the merely pleasant boy; these and the combinations arrived at from these types were the output. There was no use for others.
Then had succeeded those three nightmare years in the Guards, where, with his more mature power of observation, he had become more actively conscious of his inability to take his place on any of the recognised platforms. And all the time, like an owl on his solitary perch, he had gazed out lonelily, while the other birds of day, too polite to mock him, had merely passed him by. One such, it is true—his cousin—had sat by him, and the poor owl’s heart had gone out to him. But even Francis, so he saw now, had not understood. He had but accepted the fact of him without repugnance, had been fond of him as a queer sort of kind elder cousin.
Then there was Aunt Barbara. Aunt Barbara, Michael allowed, had understood a good deal; she had pointed out with her unerringly humourous finger the obstacles he had made for himself.
But could Aunt Barbara understand the rapture of living which this one week of liberty had given him? That Michael doubted. She had only pointed out the disabilities he made for himself. She did not know what he was capable of in the way of happiness. But he thought, though without self-consciousness, how delightful it would be to show himself, the new, unshelled self, to Aunt Barbara again.
A laughing couple went tapping down the street below his window, boy and girl, with arms and waists interlaced. They were laughing at nothing at all, except that they were boy and girl together and it was all glorious fun. But the sight of them gave Michael a sudden spasm of envy. With all this enlightenment that had come to him during this last week, there had come no gleam of what that simplest and commonest aspect of human nature meant. He had never felt towards a girl what that round-faced German boy felt. He was not sure, but he thought he disliked girls; they meant nothing to him, anyhow, and the mere thought of his arm round a girl’s waist only suggested a very embarrassing attitude. He had nothing to say to them, and the knowledge of his inability filled him with an uncomfortable sense of his want of normality, just as did the consciousness of his long arms and stumpy legs.
There was a night he remembered when Francis had insisted that he should go with him to a discreet little supper party after an evening at the music-hall. There were just four of them—he, Francis, and two companions—and he played the role of sour gooseberry to his cousin, who, with the utmost gaiety, had proved himself completely equal to the inauspicious occasion, and had drank indiscriminately out of both the girls’ glasses, and lit cigarettes for them; and, after seeing them both home, had looked in on Michael, and gone into fits of laughter at his general incompatibility.
The steps and conversation passed round the corner, and Michael, stretching his bare toes on to the cool balcony, resumed his researches—those joyful, unegoistic researches into himself. His liberty was bound up with his music; the first gave the key to the second. Often as he had rested, so to speak, in oases of music in London, they were but a pause from the desert of his uncongenial life into the desert again. But now the desert was vanished, and the oasis stretched illimitable to the horizon in front of him. That was where, for the future, his life was to be passed, not idly, sitting under trees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths. It was that aspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, would never be able to understand. To Lord Ashbridge’s mind, music was vaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pink carnations; he was congenitally incapable of viewing it in any other light than a diversion, something that took place between nine and eleven o’clock in the evening, and in smaller quantities at church on Sunday morning. He would undoubtedly have said that Handel’s Messiah was the noblest example of music in the world, because of its subject; music did not exist for him as a separate, definite and infinite factor of life; and since it did not so exist for himself, he could not imagine it existing for anybody else. That Michael correctly knew to be his father’s general demeanour towards life; he wanted everybody in their respective spheres to be like what he was in his. They must take their part, as he undoubtedly did, in the Creation-scheme when the British aristocracy came into being.
A fresh factor had come into Michael’s conception of music during these last seven days. He had become aware that Germany was music. He had naturally known before that the vast proportion of music came from Germany, that almost all of that which meant “music” to him was of German origin; but that was a very different affair from the conviction now borne in on his mind that there was not only no music apart from Germany, but that there was no Germany apart from music.
But every moment he spent in this wayside puddle of a town (for so Baireuth seemed to an unbiased view), he became more and more aware that music beat in the German blood even as sport beat in the blood of his own people. During this festival week Baireuth existed only because of that; at other times Baireuth was probably as non-existent as any dull and minor town in the English Midlands. But, owing to the fact of music being for these weeks resident in Baireuth, the sordid little townlet became the capital of the huge, patient Empire. It existed just now simply for that reason; to-night, with the curtain of the last act of Parsifal, it had ceased to exist again. It was not that a patriotic desire to honour one of the national heroes in the home where he had been established by the mad genius of a Bavarian king that moved them; it was because for the moment that Baireuth to Germans meant Germany. From Berlin, from Dresden, from Frankfurt, from Luxemburg, from a hundred towns those who were most typically German, whether high or low, rich or poor, made their joyous pilgrimage. Joy and solemnity, exultation and the yearning that could never be satisfied drew them here. And even as music was in Michael’s heart, so Germany was there also. They were the people who understood; they did not go to the opera as a be-diamonded interlude between a dinner and a dance; they came to this dreadful little town, the discomforts of which, the utter provinciality of which was transformed into the air of the heavenly Jerusalem, as Hermann Falbe had said, because their souls were fed here with wine and manna. He would find the same thing at Munich, so Falbe had told him, the next week.
The loves and the tragedies of the great titanic forces that saw the making of the world; the dreams and the deeds of the masters of Nuremberg; above all, sacrifice and enlightenment and redemption of the soul; how, except by music, could these be made manifest? It was the first and only and final alchemy that could by its magic transformation give an answer to the tremendous riddles of consciousness; that could lift you, though tearing and making mincemeat of you, to the serenity of the Pisgah-top, whence was seen the promised land. It, in itself, was reality; and the door-keeper who admitted you into that enchanted realm was the spirit of Germany. Not France, with its little, morbid shiverings, and its meat-market called love; not Italy, with its melodious declamations and tawdry tunes; not Russia even, with the wind of its impenetrable winters, its sense of joys snatched from its eternal frosts gave admittance there; but Germany, “deep, patient Germany,” that sprang from upland hamlets, and flowed down with ever-broadening stream into the illimitable ocean.
Here, then, were two of the initiations that had come, with the swiftness of the spate in Alpine valleys at the melting of the snow, upon Michael; his own liberty, namely, and this new sense of music. He had groped, he felt now, like a blind man in that direction, guided only by his instinct, and on a sudden the scales had fallen from his eyes, and he knew that his instinct had guided him right. But not less epoch-making had been the dawn of friendship. Throughout the week his intimacy with Hermann Falbe had developed, shooting up like an aloe flower, and rising into sunlight above the mists of his own self-occupied shyness, which had so darkly beset him all life long. He had given the best that he knew of himself to his cousin, but all the time there had never quite been absent from his mind his sense of inferiority, a sort of aching wonder why he could not be more like Francis, more careless, more capable of enjoyment, more of a normal type. But with Falbe he was able for the first time to forget himself altogether; he had met a man who did not recall him to himself, but took him clean out of that tedious dwelling which he knew so well and, indeed, disliked so much. He was rid for the first time of his morbid self-consciousness; his anchor had been taken up from its dragging in the sand, and he rode free, buoyed on waters and taken by tides. It did not occur to him to wonder whether Falbe thought him uncouth and awkward; it did not occur to him to try to be pleasant, a job over which poor Michael had so often found himself dishearteningly incapable; he let himself be himself in the consciousness that this was sufficient.
They had spent the morning together before this second performance of Parsifal that closed their series, in the woods above the theatre, and Michael, no longer blurting out his speeches, but speaking in the quiet, orderly manner in which he thought, discussed his plans.
“I shall come back to London with you after Munich,” he said, “and settle down to study. I do know a certain amount about harmony already; I have been mugging it up for the last three years. But I must do something as well as learn something, and, as I told you, I’m going to take up the piano seriously.”
Falbe was not attending particularly.
“A fine instrument, the piano,” he remarked. “There is certainly something to be done with a piano, if you know how to do it. I can strum a bit myself. Some keys are harder than others—the black notes.”
“Yes; what of the black notes?” asked Michael.
“Oh! they’re black. The rest are white. I beg your pardon!”
Michael laughed.
“When you have finished drivelling,” he said, “you might let me know.”
“I have finished drivelling, Michael. I was thinking about something else.”
“Not really?”
“Really.”
“Then it was impolite of you, but you haven’t any manners. I was talking about my career. I want to do something, and these large hands are really rather nimble. But I must be taught. The question is whether you will teach me.”
Falbe hesitated.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, “till I have heard you play. It’s like this: I can’t teach you to play unless you know how, and I can’t tell if you know how until I have heard you. If you have got that particular sort of temperament that can put itself into the notes out of the ends of your fingers, I can teach you, and I will. But if you haven’t, I shall feel bound to advise you to try the Jew’s harp, and see if you can get it out of your teeth. I’m not mocking you; I fancy you know that. But some people, however keenly and rightly they feel, cannot bring their feelings out through their fingers. Others can; it is a special gift. If you haven’t got it, I can’t teach you anything, and there is no use in wasting your time and mine. You can teach yourself to be frightfully nimble with your fingers, and all the people who don’t know will say: ‘How divinely Lord Comber plays! That sweet thing; is it Brahms or Mendelssohn?’ But I can’t really help you towards that; you can do that for yourself. But if you’ve got the other, I can and will teach you all that you really know already.”
“Go on!” said Michael.
“That’s just the devil with the piano,” said Falbe. “It’s the easiest instrument of all to make a show on, and it is the rarest sort of person who can play on it. That’s why, all those years, I have hated giving lessons. If one has to, as I have had to, one must take any awful miss with a pigtail, and make a sham pianist of her. One can always do that. But it would be waste of time for you and me; you wouldn’t want to be made a sham pianist, and simply I wouldn’t make you one.”
Michael turned round.
“Good Lord!” he said, “the suspense is worse than I can bear. Isn’t there a piano in your room? Can’t we go down there, and have it over?”
“Yes, if you wish. I can tell at once if you are capable of playing—at least, whether I think you are capable of playing—whether I can teach you.”
“But I haven’t touched a piano for a week,” said Michael.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’ve touched a piano for a year.”
Michael had not been prevented by the economy that made him travel second-class from engaging a carriage by the day at Baireuth, since that clearly was worth while, and they found it waiting for them by the theatre. There was still time to drive to Falbe’s lodging and get through this crucial ordeal before the opera, and they went straight there. A very venerable instrument, which Falbe had not yet opened, stood against the wall, and he struck a few notes on it.
“Completely out of tune,” he said; “but that doesn’t matter. Now then!”
“But what am I to play?” asked Michael.
“Anything you like.”
He sat down at the far end of the room, put his long legs up on to another chair and waited. Michael sent a despairing glance at that gay face, suddenly grown grim, and took his seat. He felt a paralysing conviction that Falbe’s judgment, whatever that might turn out to be, would be right, and the knowledge turned his fingers stiff. From the few notes that Falbe had struck he guessed on what sort of instrument his ordeal was to take place, and yet he knew that Falbe himself would have been able to convey to him the sense that he could play, though the piano was all out of tune, and there might be dumb, disconcerting notes in it. There was justice in Falbe’s dictum about the temperament that lay behind the player, which would assert itself through any faultiness of instrument, and through, so he suspected, any faultiness of execution.
He struck a chord, and heard it jangle dissonantly.
“Oh, it’s not fair,” he said.
“Get on!” said Falbe.
In spite of Germany there occurred to Michael a Chopin prelude, at which he had worked a little during the last two months in London. The notes he knew perfectly; he had believed also that he had found a certain conception of it as a whole, so that he could make something coherent out of it, not merely adding bar to correct bar. And he began the soft repetition of chord-quavers with which it opened.
Then after stumbling wretchedly through two lines of it, he suddenly forgot himself and Falbe, and the squealing unresponsive notes. He heard them no more, absorbed in the knowledge of what he meant by them, of the mood which they produced in him. His great, ungainly hands had all the gentleness and self-control that strength gives, and the finger-filling chords were as light and as fine as the settling of some poised bird on a bough. In the last few lines of the prelude a deep bass note had to be struck at the beginning of each bar; this Michael found was completely dumb, but so clear and vivid was the effect of it in his mind that he scarcely noticed that it returned no answer to his finger. . . . At the end he sat without moving, his hands dropped on to his knees.
Falbe got up and, coming over to the piano, struck the bass note himself.
“Yes, I knew it was dumb,” he said, “but you made me think it wasn’t. . . . You got quite a good tone out of it.”
He paused a moment, again striking the dumb note, as if to make sure that it was soundless.
“Yes; I’ll teach you,” he said. “All the technique you have got, you know, is wrong from beginning to end, and you mustn’t mind unlearning all that. But you’ve got the thing that matters.”
All this stewed and seethed in Michael’s mind as he sat that night by the window looking out on to the silent and empty street. His thoughts flowed without check or guide from his will, wandering wherever their course happened to take them, now lingering, like the water of a river in some deep, still pool, when he thought of the friendship that had come into his life, now excitedly plunging down the foam of swift-flowing rapids in the exhilaration of his newly-found liberty, now proceeding with steady current at the thought of the weeks of unremitting industry at a beloved task that lay in front of him. He could form no definite image out of these which should represent his ordinary day; it was all lost in a bright haze through which its shape was but faintly discernible; but life lay in front of him with promise, a thing to be embraced and greeted with welcome and eager hands, instead of being a mere marsh through which he had to plod with labouring steps, a business to be gone about without joy and without conviction in its being worth while.
He wondered for a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelings would have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throated and voiceless piano, Falbe had said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything with you.” As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a few pupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view to emerging as a concert-giver the next winter; and as Michael had sat down, he remembered telling himself that there was really not the slightest chance of his friend accepting him as a pupil. He did not intend that this rejection should make the smallest difference to his aim, but he knew that he would start his work under the tremendous handicap of Falbe not believing that he had it in him to play, and under the disappointment of not enjoying the added intimacy which work with and for Falbe would give him. Then he had engaged in this tussle with refractory notes till he quite lost himself in what he was playing, and thought no more either of Falbe or the piano, but only of what the melody meant to him. But at the end, when he came to himself again, and sat with dropped hands waiting for Falbe’s verdict, he remembered how his heart seemed to hang poised until it came. He had rehearsed again to himself his fixed determination that he would play and could play, whatever his friend might think about it; but there was no doubt that he waited with a greater suspense than he had ever known in his life before for that verdict to be made known to him.
Next day came their journey to Munich, and the installation in the best hotel in Europe. Here Michael was host, and the economy which he practised when he had only himself to provide for, and which made him go second-class when travelling, was, as usual, completely abandoned now that the pleasure of hospitality was his. He engaged at once the best double suite of rooms that the hotel contained, two bedrooms with bathrooms, and an admirable sitting-room, looking spaciously out on to the square, and with brusque decision silenced Falbe’s attempted remonstrance. “Don’t interfere with my show, please,” he had said, and proceeded to inquire about a piano to be sent in for the week. Then he turned to his friend again. “Oh, we are going to enjoy ourselves,” he said, with an irresistible sincerity.
Tristan und Isolde was given on the third day of their stay there, and Falbe, reading the morning German paper, found news.
“The Kaiser has arrived,” he said. “There’s a truce in the army manoeuvres for a couple of days, and he has come to be present at Tristan this evening. He’s travelled three hundred miles to get here, and will go back to-morrow. The Reise-Kaiser, you know.”
Michael looked up with some slight anxiety.
“Ought I to write my name or anything?” he asked. “He has stayed several times with my father.”
“Has he? But I don’t suppose it matters. The visit is a widely-advertised incognito. That’s his way. God be with the All-highest,” he added.
“Well, I shan’t” said Michael. “But it would shock my father dreadfully if he knew. The Kaiser looks on him as the type and model of the English nobleman.”
Michael crunched one of the inimitable breakfast rusks in his teeth.
“Lord, what a day we had when he was at Ashbridge last year,” he said. “We began at eight with a review of the Suffolk Yeomanry; then we had a pheasant shoot from eleven till three; then the Emperor had out a steam launch and careered up and down the river till six, asking a thousand questions about the tides and the currents and the navigable channels. Then he lectured us on the family portraits till dinner; after dinner there was a concert, at which he conducted the ‘Song to Aegir,’ and then there was a torch-light fandango by the tenants on the lawn. He was on his holiday, you must remember.”
“I heard the ‘Song to Aegir’ once,” remarked Falbe, with a perfectly level intonation.
“I was—er—luckier,” said Michael politely, “because on that occasion I heard it twice. It was encored.”
“And what did it sound like the second time?” asked Falbe.
“Much as before,” said Michael.
The advent of the Emperor had put the whole town in a ferment. Though the visit was quite incognito, an enormous military staff which had been poured into the town might have led the thoughtful to suspect the Kaiser’s presence, even if it had not been announced in the largest type in the papers, and marchings and counter-marchings of troops and sudden bursts of national airs proclaimed the august presence. He held an informal review of certain Bavarian troops not out for manoeuvres in the morning, visited the sculpture gallery and pinacothek in the afternoon, and when Hermann and Michael went up to the theatre they found rows of soldiers drawn up, and inside unusual decorations over a section of stalls which had been removed and was converted into an enormous box. This was in the centre of the first tier, nearly at right angles to where they sat, in the front row of the same tier; and when, with military punctuality, the procession of uniforms, headed by the Emperor, filed in, the whole of the crowded house stood up and broke into a roar of recognition and loyalty.
For a minute, or perhaps more, the Emperor stood facing the house with his hand raised in salute, a figure the uprightness of which made him look tall. His brilliant uniform was ablaze with decorations; he seemed every inch a soldier and a leader of men. For that minute he stood looking neither to the right nor left, stern and almost frowning, with no shadow of a smile playing on the tightly-drawn lips, above which his moustache was brushed upwards in two stiff protuberances towards his eyes. He was there just then not to see, but to be seen, his incognito was momentarily in abeyance, and he stood forth the supreme head of his people, the All-highest War Lord, who had come that day from the field, to which he would return across half Germany tomorrow. It was an impressive and dignified moment, and Michael heard Falbe say to himself: “Kaiserlich! Kaiserlich!”
Then it was over. The Emperor sat down, beckoned to two of his officers, who had stood in a group far at the back of the box, to join him, and with one on each side he looked about the house and chatted to them. He had taken out his opera-glass, which he adjusted, using his right hand only, and looked this way and that, as if, incognito again, he was looking for friends in the house. Once Michael thought that he looked rather long and fixedly in his direction, and then, putting down his glass, he said something to one of the officers, this time clearly pointing towards Michael. Then he gave some signal, just raising his hand towards the orchestra, and immediately the lights were put down, the whole house plunged in darkness, except where the lamps in the sunk orchestra faintly illuminated the base of the curtain, and the first longing, unsatisfied notes of the prelude began.
The next hour passed for Michael in one unbroken mood of absorption. The supreme moment of knowing the music intimately and of never having seen the opera before was his, and all that he had dreamed of or imagined as to the possibilities of music was flooded and drowned in the thing itself. You could not say that it was more gigantic than The Ring, more human than the Meistersingers, more emotional than Parsifal, but it was utterly and wholly different to anything else he had ever seen or conjectured. Falbe, he himself, the thronged and silent theatre, the Emperor, Munich, Germany, were all blotted out of his consciousness. He just watched, as if discarnate, the unrolling of the decrees of Fate which were to bring so simple and overpowering a tragedy on the two who drained the love-potion together. And at the end he fell back in his seat, feeling thrilled and tired, exhilarated and exhausted.
“Oh, Hermann,” he said, “what years I’ve wasted!”
Falbe laughed.
“You’ve wasted more than you know yet,” he said. “Hallo!”
A very resplendent officer had come clanking down the gangway next them. He put his heels together and bowed.
“Lord Comber, I think?” he said in excellent English.
Michael roused himself.
“Yes?” he said.
“His Imperial Majesty has done me the honour to desire you to come and speak to him,” he said.
“Now?” said Michael.
“If you will be so good,” and he stood aside for Michael to pass up the stairs in front of him.
In the wide corridor behind he joined him again.
“Allow me to introduce myself as Count von Bergmann,” he said, “and one of His Majesty’s aides-de-camp. The Kaiser always speaks with great pleasure of the visits he has paid to your father, and he saw you immediately he came into the theatre. If you will permit me, I would advise you to bow, but not very low, respecting His Majesty’s incognito, to seat yourself as soon as he desires it, and to remain till he gives you some speech of dismissal. Forgive me for going in front of you here. I have to introduce you to His Majesty’s presence.”
Michael followed him down the steps to the front of the box.
“Lord Comber, All-highest,” he said, and instantly stood back.
The Emperor rose and held out his hand, and Michael, bowing over it as he took it, felt himself seized in the famous grip of steel, of which its owner as well as its recipient was so conscious.
“I am much pleased to see you, Lord Comber,” said he. “I could not resist the pleasure of a little chat with you about our beloved England. And your excellent father, how is he?”
He indicated a chair to Michael, who, as advised, instantly took it, though the Emperor remained a moment longer standing.
“I left him in very good health, Your Majesty,” said Michael.
“Ah! I am glad to hear it. I desire you to convey to him my friendliest greetings, and to your mother also. I well remember my last visit to his house above the tidal estuary at Ashbridge, and I hope it may not be very long before I have the opportunity to be in England again.”
He spoke in a voice that seemed rather hoarse and tired, but his manner expressed the most courteous cordiality. His face, which had been as still as a statue’s when he showed himself to the house, was now never in repose for a moment. He kept turning his head, which he carried very upright, this way and that as he spoke; now he would catch sight of someone in the audience to whom he directed his glance, now he would peer over the edge of the low balustrade, now look at the group of officers who stood apart at the back of the box.
His whole demeanour suggested a nervous, highly-strung condition; the restlessness of it was that of a man overstrained, who had lost the capability of being tranquil. Now he frowned, now he smiled, but never for a moment was he quiet. Then he launched a perfect hailstorm of questions at Michael, to the answers to which (there was scarcely time for more than a monosyllable in reply) he listened with an eager and a suspicious attention. They were concerned at first with all sorts of subjects: inquired if Michael had been at Baireuth, what he was going to do after the Munich festival was over, if he had English friends here. He inquired Falbe’s name, looked at him for a moment through his glasses, and desired to know more about him. Then, learning he was a teacher of the piano in England, and had a sister who sang, he expressed great satisfaction.
“I like to see my subjects, when there is no need for their services at home,” he said, “learning about other lands, and bringing also to other lands the culture of the Fatherland, even as it always gives me pleasure to see the English here, strengthening by the study of the arts the bonds that bind our two great nations together. You English must learn to understand us and our great mission, just as we must learn to understand you.”
Then the questions became more specialised, and concerned the state of things in England. He laughed over the disturbances created by the Suffragettes, was eager to hear what politicians thought about the state of things in Ireland, made specific inquiries about the Territorial Force, asked about the Navy, the state of the drama in London, the coal strike which was threatened in Yorkshire. Then suddenly he put a series of personal questions.
“And you, you are in the Guards, I think?” he said.
“No, sir; I have just resigned my commission,” said Michael.
“Why? Why is that? Have many of your officers been resigning?”
“I am studying music, Your Majesty,” said Michael.
“I am glad to see you came to Germany to do it. Berlin? You ought to spend a couple of months in Berlin. Perhaps you are thinking of doing so.”
He turned round quickly to one of his staff who had approached him.
“Well, what is it?” he said.
Count von Bergmann bowed low.
“The Herr-Director,” he said, “humbly craves to know whether it is Your Majesty’s pleasure that the opera shall proceed.”
The Kaiser laughed.
“There, Lord Comber,” he said, “you see how I am ordered about. They wish to cut short my conversation with you. Yes, Bergmann, we will go on. You will remain with me, Lord Comber, for this act.”
Immediately after the lights were lowered again, the curtain rose, and a most distracting hour began for Michael. His neighbour was never still for a single moment. Now he would shift in his chair, now with his hand he would beat time on the red velvet balustrade in front of him, and a stream of whispered appreciation and criticism flowed from him.
“They are taking the opening scene a little too slow,” he said. “I shall call the director’s attention to that. But that crescendo is well done; yes, that is most effective. The shawl—observe the beautiful lines into which the shawl falls as she waves it. That is wonderful—a very impressive entry. Ah, but they should not cross the stage yet; it is more effective if they remain longer there. Brangane sings finely; she warns them that the doom is near.”
He gave a little giggle, which reminded Michael of his father.
“Brangane is playing gooseberry, as you say in England,” he said. “A big gooseberry, is she not? Ah, bravo! bravo! Wunderschon! Yes, enter King Mark from his hunting. Very fine. Say I was particularly pleased with the entry of King Mark, Bergmann. A wonderful act! Wagner never touched greater heights.”
At the end the Emperor rose and again held out his hand.
“I am pleased to have seen you, Lord Comber,” he said. “Do not forget my message to your father; and take my advice and come to Berlin in the winter. We are always pleased to see the English in Germany.”
As Michael left the box he ran into the Herr-Director, who had been summoned to get a few hints.
He went back to join Falbe in a state of republican irritation, which the honour that had been done him did not at all assuage. There was an hour’s interval before the third act, and the two drove back to their hotel to dine there. But Michael found his friend wholly unsympathetic with his chagrin. To him, it was quite clear, the disappointment of not having been able to attend very closely to the second act of Tristan was negligible compared to the cause that had occasioned it. It was possible for the ordinary mortal to see Tristan over and over again, but to converse with the Kaiser was a thing outside the range of the average man. And again in this interval, as during the act itself, Michael was bombarded with questions. What did the Kaiser say? Did he remember Ashbridge? Did Michael twice receive the iron grip? Did the All-highest say anything about the manoeuvres? Did he look tired, or was it only the light above his head that made him appear so haggard? Even his opinion about the opera was of interest. Did he express approval?
This was too much for Michael.
“My dear Hermann,” he said, “we alluded very cautiously to the ‘Song to Aegir’ this morning, and delicately remarked that you had heard it once and I twice. How can you care what his opinion of this opera is?”
Falbe shook his handsome head, and gesticulated with his fine hands.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You have just been talking to him himself. I long to hear his every word and intonation. There is the personality, which to us means so much, in which is summed up all Germany. It is as if I had spoken to Rule Britannia herself. Would you not be interested? There is no one in the world who is to his country what the Kaiser is to us. When you told me he had stayed at Ashbridge I was thrilled, but I was ashamed lest you should think me snobbish, which indeed I am not. But now I am past being ashamed.”
He poured out a glass of wine and drank it with a “Hoch!”
“In his hand lies peace and war,” he said. “It is as he pleases. The Emperor and his Chancellor can make Germany do exactly what they choose, and if the Chancellor does not agree with the Emperor, the Emperor can appoint one who does. That is what it comes to; that is why he is as vast as Germany itself. The Reichstag but advises where he is concerned. Have you no imagination, Michael? Europe lies in the hand that shook yours.”
Michael laughed.
“I suppose I must have no imagination,” he said. “I don’t picture it even now when you point it out.”
Falbe pointed an impressive forefinger.
“But for him,” he said, “England and Germany would have been at each other’s throats over the business at Agadir. He held the warhounds in leash—he, their master, who made them.”
“Oh, he made them, anyhow,” said Michael.
“Naturally. It is his business to be ready for any attack on the part of those who are jealous at our power. The whole Fatherland is a sword in his hand, which he sheathes. It would long ago have leaped from the scabbard but for him.”
“Against whom?” asked Michael. “Who is the enemy?”
Falbe hesitated.
“There is no enemy at present,” he said, “but the enemy potentially is any who tries to thwart our peaceful expansion.”
Suddenly the whole subject tasted bitter to Michael. He recalled, instinctively, the Emperor’s great curiosity to be informed on English topics by the ordinary Englishman with whom he had acquaintance.
“Oh, let’s drop it,” he said. “I really didn’t come to Munich to talk politics, of which I know nothing whatever.”
Falbe nodded.
“That is what I have said to you before,” he remarked. “You are the most happy-go-lucky of the nations. Did he speak of England?”
“Yes, of his beloved England,” said Michael. “He was extremely cordial about our relations.”
“Good. I like that,” said Falbe briskly.
“And he recommended me to spend two months in Berlin in the winter,” added Michael, sliding off on to other topics.
Falbe smiled.
“I like that less,” he said, “since that will mean you will not be in London.”
“But I didn’t commit myself,” said Michael, smiling back; “though I can say ‘beloved Germany’ with equal sincerity.”
Falbe got up.
“I would wish that—that you were Kaiser of England,” he said.
“God forbid!” said Michael. “I should not have time to play the piano.”
During the next day or two Michael often found himself chipping at the bed-rock, so to speak, of this conversation, and Falbe’s revealed attitude towards his country and, in particular, towards its supreme head. It seemed to him a wonderful and an enviable thing that anyone could be so thoroughly English as Falbe certainly was in his ordinary, everyday life, and that yet, at the back of this there should lie so profound a patriotism towards another country, and so profound a reverence to its ruler. In his general outlook on life, his friend appeared to be entirely of one blood with himself, yet now on two or three occasions a chance spark had lit up this Teutonic beacon. To Michael this mixture of nationalities seemed to be a wonderful gift; it implied a widening of one’s sympathies and outlook, a larger comprehension of life than was possible to any of undiluted blood.
For himself, like most young Englishmen of his day, he was not conscious of any tremendous sense of patriotism like this. Somewhere, deep down in him, he supposed there might be a source, a well of English waters, which some explosion in his nature might cause to flood him entirely, but such an idea was purely hypothetical; he did not, in fact, look forward to such a bouleversement as being a possible contingency. But with Falbe it was different; quite a small cause, like the sight of the Rhine at Cologne, or a Bavarian village at sunset, or the fact of a friend having talked with the Emperor, was sufficient to make his innate patriotism find outlet in impassioned speech. He wondered vaguely whether Falbe’s explanation of this—namely, that nationally the English were prosperous, comfortable and insouciant—was perhaps sound. It seemed that the notion was not wholly foundationless.
CHAPTER VI
Michael had been practising all the morning of a dark November day, had eaten a couple of sandwiches standing in front of his fire, and observed with some secret satisfaction that the fog which had lifted for an hour had come down on the town again in earnest, and that it was only reasonable to dismiss the possibility of going out, and spend the afternoon as he had spent the morning. But he permitted himself a few minutes’ relaxation as he smoked his cigarette, and sat down by the window, looking out, in Lucretian mood, on to the very dispiriting conditions that prevailed in the street.
Though it was still only between one and two in the afternoon, the densest gloom prevailed, so that it was impossible to see the outlines even of the houses across the street, and the only evidence that he was not in some desert spot lay in the fact of a few twinkling lights, looking incredibly remote, from the windows opposite and the gas-lamps below. Traffic seemed to be at a standstill; the accustomed roar from Piccadilly was dumb, and he looked out on to a silent and vapour-swathed world. This isolation from all his fellows and from the chances of being disturbed, it may be added, gave him a sense of extreme satisfaction. He wanted his piano, but no intrusive presence. He liked the sensation of being shut up in his own industrious citadel, secure from interruption.
During the last two months and a half since his return from Munich he had experienced greater happiness, had burned with a stronger zest for life than during the whole of his previous existence. Not only had he been working at that which he believed he was fitted for, and which gave him the stimulus which, one way or another, is essential to all good work, but he had been thrown among people who were similarly employed, with whom he had this great common ground of kinship in ambition and aim. No more were the days too long from being but half-filled with work with which he had no sympathy, and diversions that gave him no pleasure; none held sufficient hours for all that he wanted to put into it. And in this busy atmosphere, where his own studies took so much of his time and energy, and where everybody else was in some way similarly employed, that dismal self-consciousness which so drearily looked on himself shuffling along through fruitless, uncongenial days was cracking off him as the chestnut husk cracks when the kernel within swells and ripens.
Apart from his work, the centre of his life was certainly the household of the Falbes, where the brother and sister lived with their mother. She turned out to be in a rather remote manner “one of us,” and had about her, very faint and dim, like an antique lavender bag, the odour of Ashbridge. She lived like the lilies of the field, without toiling or spinning, either literally or with the more figurative work of the mind; indeed, she can scarcely be said to have had any mind at all, for, as with drugs, she had sapped it away by a practically unremitting perusal of all the fiction that makes the average reader wonder why it was written. In fact, she supplied the answer to that perplexing question, since it was clearly written for her. She was not in the least excited by these tales, any more than the human race are excited by the oxygen in the air, but she could not live without them. She subscribed to three lending libraries, which, by this time had probably learned her tastes, for if she ever by ill-chance embarked on a volume which ever so faintly adumbrated the realities of life, she instantly returned it, as she found it painful; and, naturally, she did not wish to be pained. This did not, however, prevent her reading those that dealt with amiable young men who fell in love with amiable young women, and were for the moment sundered by red-haired adventuresses or black-haired moneylenders, for those she found not painful but powerful, and could often remember where she had got to in them, which otherwise was not usually the case. She wore a good deal of lace, spoke in a tired voice, and must certainly have been of the type called “sweetly pretty” some quarter of a century ago. She drank hot water with her meals, and continually reminded Michael of his own mother.
Sylvia and Hermann certainly did all that could be done for her; in other words, they invariably saw that her water was hot, and her stock of novels replenished. But when that was accomplished, there really appeared to be little more that could be done for her. Her presence in a room counted for about as much as a rather powerful shadow on the wall, unexplained by any solid object which could have made it appear there. But most of the day she spent in her own room, which was furnished exactly in accordance with her twilight existence. There was a writing-table there, which she never used, several low arm-chairs (one of which she was always using), by each of which was a small table, on to which she could put the book that she was at the moment engaged on. Lace hangings, of the sort that prevent anybody either seeing in or out, obscured the windows; and for decoration there were china figures on the chimney-piece, plush-rimmed plates on the walls, and a couple of easels, draped with chiffon, on which stood enlarged photographs of her husband and her children.
There was, it may be added, nothing in the least pathetic about her, for, as far as could be ascertained, she had everything she wanted. In fact, from the standpoint of commonsense, hers was the most successful existence; for, knowing what she liked, she passed her entire life in its accomplishment. The only thing that caused her emotion was the energy and vitality of her two children, and even then that emotion was but a mild surprise when she recollected how tremendous a worker and boisterous a gourmand of life was her late husband, on the anniversary of whose death she always sat all day without reading any novels at all, but devoted what was left of her mind to the contemplation of nothing at all. She had married him because, for some inscrutable reason, he insisted on it; and she had been resigned to his death, as to everything else that had ever happened to her.
All her life, in fact, she had been of that unchangeable, drab quality in emotional affairs which is characteristic of advanced middle-age, when there are no great joys or sorrows to look back on, and no expectation for the future. She had always had something of the indestructible quality of frail things like thistledown or cottonwool; violence and explosion that would blow strong and distinct organisms to atoms only puffed her a yard or two away where she alighted again without shock, instead of injuring or annihilating her. . . . Yet, in the inexplicable ways of love, Sylvia and her brother not only did what could be done for her, but regarded her with the tenderest affection. What that love lived on, what was its daily food would be hard to guess, were it not that love lives on itself.
The rest of the house, apart from the vacuum of Mrs. Falbe’s rooms, conducted itself, so it seemed to Michael, at the highest possible pressure. Sylvia and her brother were both far too busy to be restless, and if, on the one hand, Mrs. Falbe’s remote, impenetrable life was inexplicable, not less inexplicable was the rage for living that possessed the other two. From morning till night, and on Sundays from night till morning, life proceeded at top speed.
As regards household arrangements, which were all in Sylvia’s hands, there were three fixed points in the day. That is to say, that there was lunch for Mrs. Falbe and anybody else who happened to be there at half-past one; tea in Mrs. Falbe’s well-liked sitting-room at five, and dinner at eight. These meals—Mrs. Falbe always breakfasted in her bedroom—were served with quiet decorum. Apart from them, anybody who required anything consulted the cook personally. Hermann, for instance, would have spent the morning at his piano in the vast studio at the back of their house in Maidstone Crescent, and not arrived at the fact that it was lunch time till perhaps three in the afternoon. Unless then he settled to do without lunch altogether, he must forage for himself; or Sylvia, having to sing at a concert at eight, would return famished and exultant about ten; she would then proceed to provide herself, unless she supped elsewhere, with a plate of eggs and bacon, or anything else that was easily accessible. It was not from preference that these haphazard methods were adopted; but since they only kept two servants, it was clear that a couple of women, however willing, could not possibly cope with so irregular a commissariat in addition to the series of fixed hours and the rest of the household work. As it was, two splendidly efficient persons, one German, the other English, had filled the posts of parlourmaid and cook for the last eight years, and regarded themselves, and were regarded, as members of the family. Lucas, the parlourmaid, indeed, from the intense interest she took in the conversation at table, could not always resist joining in it, and was apt to correct Hermann or his sister if she detected an inaccuracy in their statements. “No, Miss Sylvia,” she would say, “it was on Thursday, not Wednesday,” and then recollecting herself, would add, “Beg your pardon, miss.”
In this milieu, as new to Michael as some suddenly discovered country, he found himself at once plunged and treated with instant friendly intimacy. Hermann, so he supposed, must have given him a good character, for he was made welcome before he could have had time to make any impression for himself, as Hermann’s friend. On the first occasion of his visiting the house, for the purpose of his music lesson, he had stopped to lunch afterwards, where he met Sylvia, and was in the presence of (you could hardly call it more than that) their mother.
Mrs. Falbe had faded away in some mist-like fashion soon after, but it was evident that he was intended to do no such thing, and they had gone into the studio, already comrades, and Michael had chiefly listened while the other two had violent and friendly discussions on every subject under the sun. Then Hermann happened to sit down at the piano, and played a Chopin etude pianissimo prestissimo with finger-tips that just made the notes to sound and no more, and Sylvia told him that he was getting it better; and then Sylvia sang “Who is Sylvia?” and Hermann told her that she shouldn’t have eaten so much lunch, or shouldn’t have sung; and then, by transitions that Michael could not recollect, they played the Hailstone Chorus out of Israel in Egypt (or, at any rate, reproduced the spirit of it), and both sang at the top of their voices. Then, as usually happened in the afternoon, two or three friends dropped in, and though these were all intimate with their hosts, Michael had no impression of being out in the cold or among strangers. And when he left he felt as if he had been stretching out chilly hands to the fire, and that the fire was always burning there, ready for him to heat himself at, with its welcoming flames and core of sincere warmth, whenever he felt so disposed.
At first he had let himself do this much less often than he would have liked, for the shyness of years, his over-sensitive modesty at his own want of charm and lightness, was a self-erected barrier in his way. He was, in spite of his intimacy with Hermann, desperately afraid of being tiresome, of checking by his presence, as he had so often felt himself do before, the ease and high spirits of others. But by degrees this broke down; he realised that he was now among those with whom he had that kinship of the mind and of tastes which makes the foundation on which friendship, and whatever friendship may ripen into, is securely built. Never did the simplicity and sincerity of their welcome fail; the cordiality which greeted him was always his; he felt that it was intended that he should be at home there just as much as he cared to be.
The six working days of the week, however, were as a rule too full both for the Falbes and for Michael to do more than have, apart from the music lessons, flying glimpses of each other; for the day was taken up with work, concerts and opera occurred often in the evening, and the shuttles of London took their threads in divergent directions. But on Sunday the house at Maidstone Crescent ceased, as Hermann said, to be a junction, and became a temporary terminus.
“We burst from our chrysalis, in fact,” he said. “If you find it clearer to understand this way, we burst from our chrysalis and become a caterpillar. Do chrysalides become caterpillars! We do, anyhow. If you come about eight you will find food; if you come later you will also find food of a sketchier kind. People have a habit of dropping in on Sunday evening. There’s music if anyone feels inclined to make any, and if they don’t they are made to. Some people come early, others late, and they stop to breakfast if they wish. It’s a gaudeamus, you know, a jolly, a jamboree. One has to relax sometimes.”
Michael felt all his old unfitness for dreadful crowds return to him.
“Oh, I’m so bad at that sort of thing,” he said. “I am a frightful kill-joy, Hermann.”
Hermann sat down on the treble part of his piano.
“That’s the most conceited thing I’ve heard you say yet,” he remarked. “Nobody will pay any attention to you; you won’t kill anybody’s joy. Also it’s rather rude of you.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” said Michael.
“Then we must suppose you were rude by accident. That is the worst sort of rudeness.”
“I’m sorry; I’ll come,” said Michael.
“That’s right. You might even find yourself enjoying it by accident, you know. If you don’t, you can go away. There’s music; Sylvia sings quite seriously sometimes, and other people sing or bring violins, and those who don’t like it, talk—and then we get less serious. Have a try, Michael. See if you can’t be less serious, too.”
Michael slipped despairingly from his seat.
“If only I knew how!” he said. “I believe my nurse never taught me to play, only to remember that I was a little gentleman. All the same, when I am with you, or with my cousin Francis, I can manage it to a certain extent.”
Falbe looked at him encouragingly.
“Oh, you’re getting on,” he said. “You take yourself more for granted than you used to. I remember you when you used to be polite on purpose. It’s doing things on purpose that makes one serious. If you ever play the fool on purpose, you instantly cease playing the fool.”
“Is that it?” said Michael.
“Yes, of course. So come on Sunday, and forget all about it, except coming. And now, do you mind going away? I want to put in a couple of hours before lunch. You know what to practise till Tuesday, don’t you?”
That was the first Sunday evening that Michael had spent with his friends; after that, up till this present date in November, he had not missed a single one of those gatherings. They consisted almost entirely of men, and of the men there were many types, and many ages. Actors and artists, musicians and authors were indiscriminately mingled; it was the strangest conglomeration of diverse interests. But one interest, so it seemed to Michael, bound them all together; they were all doing in their different lives the things they most delighted in doing. There was the key that unlocked all the locks—namely, the enjoyment that inspired their work. The freemasonry of art and the freemasonry of the eager mind that looks out without verdict, but with only expectation and delight in experiment, passed like an open secret among them, secret because none spoke of it, open because it was so transparently obvious. And since this was so, every member of that heterogeneous community had a respect for his companions; the fact that they were there together showed that they had all passed this initiation, and knew what for them life meant.
Very soon after dinner all sitting accommodation, other than the floor, was occupied; but then the floor held the later comers, and the smoke from many cigarettes and the babble of many voices made a constantly-ascending incense before the altar dedicated to the gods that inspire all enjoyable endeavour. Then Sylvia sang, and both those who cared to hear exquisite singing and those who did not were alike silent, for this was a prayer to the gods they all worshipped; and Falbe played, and there was a quartet of strings.
After that less serious affairs held the rooms; an eminent actor was pleased to parody another eminent actor who was also present. This led to a scene in which each caricatured the other, and a French poet did gymnastic feats on the floor and upset a tray of soda-water, and a German conductor fluffed out his hair and died like Marguerite. And when in the earlier hours of the morning part of the guests had gone away, and part were broiling ham in the kitchen, Sylvia sang again, quite seriously, and Michael, in Hermann’s absence, volunteered to play her accompaniment for her. She stood behind him, and by a finger on his shoulder directed him in the way she would have him go. Michael found himself suddenly and inexplicably understanding this; her finger, by its pressure or its light tapping, seemed to him to speak in a language that he found himself familiar with, and he slowed down stroking the notes, or quickened with staccato touch, as she wordlessly directed him.
Out of all these things, which were but trivialities, pleasant, unthinking hours for all else concerned, several points stood out for Michael, points new and illuminating. The first was the simplicity of it all, the spontaneousness with which pleasure was born if only you took off your clothes, so to speak, and left them on the bank while you jumped in. All his life he had buttoned his jacket and crammed his hat on to his head. The second was the sense, indefinable but certain, that Hermann and Sylvia between them were the high priests of this memorable orgie.
He himself had met, at dreadful, solemn evenings when Lady Ashbridge and his father stood at the head of the stairs, the two eminent actors who had romped to-night, and found them exceedingly stately personages, just as no doubt they had found him an icy and awkward young man. But they, like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their environment. Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but Michael’s imagination quailed before such a supposition.
The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him more and more, was the personality of Sylvia. He had never come across a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals, winked across from one to the other, of human companionship. Always he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his self-consciousness, thought about what he should say. There had been the cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled and deterred him. But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help her singing. And even while Michael registered to himself this charming annihilation of sex, which allowed her to be to him no more than her brother was—less, in fact, but on the same plane—she had come to the end of her song, patted him on the back, as she would have patted anybody else, with a word of thanks, and, for him, suddenly leaped into significance. It was not only a singer who had sung, but an individual one called Sylvia Falbe. She took her place, at present a most inconspicuous one, on the back-cloth before which Michael’s life was acted, towards which, when no action, so to speak, was taking place, his eyes naturally turned themselves. His father and mother were there, Francis also and Aunt Barbara, and of course, larger than the rest, Hermann. Now Sylvia was discernible, and, as the days went by and their meetings multiplied, she became bigger, walked into a nearer perspective. It did not occur to Michael, rightly, to imagine himself at all in love with her, for he was not. Only she had asserted herself on his consciousness.
Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarrassments which that sex had always held for him. She grew in comradeship; he found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same warm, welcoming kindliness—the same complete absence of pose. You knew where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the multitude which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they with her, in relationship entirely unsentimental.
But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael’s most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe’s principles in teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school; he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the hours.
“What is the good of them?” he asked. “They can only give you nimbleness and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it aloud—which is playing—or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that you don’t understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try.”
Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.
“There,” he said, “begin at the top of the page.”
“But I can’t,” said Michael. “I shall have to spell it out.”
“That’s just what you mustn’t do. Go ahead, and don’t pause till you get to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its turn, and play as many notes as you can in it.”
This was a dismal experience. Michael hitherto had gone on the painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious care. Now Falbe’s inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in inextinguishable laughter.
“Go on, go on!” he shouted. “I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly Strauss’s Don Quixote.”
Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe’s laughter.
“Oh dear,” he said. “Very funny. But don’t laugh so at me, Hermann.”
Falbe dried his eyes.
“And what was it?” he said. “I declare it was the fourth fugue. An entirely different conception of it! A thoroughly original view! Now, what you’ve got to do, is to repeat that—not the same murder I mean, but other murders—for a couple of hours a day. . . . By degrees—you won’t believe it—you will find you are not murdering any longer, but only mortally wounding. After six months I dare say you won’t even be hurting your victims. All the same, you can begin with less muscular ones.”
In this way Michael’s musical horizons were infinitely extended. Not only did this system of Falbe’s of flying at new music, and going recklessly and regardlessly on, give quickness to his brain and finger, make his wits alert to pick up the new language he was learning, but it gloriously extended his vision and his range of country. He ran joyfully, though with a thousand falls and tumbles, through these new and wonderful vistas; he worshipped at the grave, Gothic sanctuaries of Beethoven, he roamed through the enchanted garden of Chopin, he felt the icy and eternal frosts of Russia, and saw in the northern sky the great auroras spread themselves in spear and sword of fire; he listened to the wisdom of Brahms, and passed through the noble and smiling country of Bach. All this, so to speak, was holiday travel, and between his journeys he applied himself with the same eager industry to the learning of his art, so that he might reproduce for himself and others true pictures of the scenes through which he scampered. Here Falbe was not so easily moved to laughter; he was as severe with Michael as he was with himself, when it was the question of learning some piece with a view to really playing it. There was no light-hearted hurrying on through blurred runs and false notes, slurred phrases and incomplete chords. Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was played again on Falbe’s great Steinway, as a professed performance, a very different standard was required.
Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.
“This won’t do, Michael,” he said. “You played it before for me to see whether you could play. You can. But it won’t do to sketch it. Every note has got to be there; Chopin didn’t write them by accident. He knew quite well what he was about. Begin again, please.”
This time Michael got not quite so far, when he was stopped again. He was playing without notes, and Falbe got up from his chair where he had the book open, and put it on the piano.
“Do you find difficulty in memorising?” he asked.
This was discouraging; Michael believed that he remembered easily; he also believed that he had long known this by heart.
“No; I thought I knew it,” he said.
“Try again.”
This time Falbe stood by him, and suddenly put his finger down into the middle of Michael’s hands, striking a note.
“You left out that F sharp,” he said. “Go on. . . . Now you are leaving out that E natural. Try to get it better by Thursday, and remember this, that playing, and all that differentiates playing from strumming, only begins when you can play all the notes that are put down for you to play without fail. You’re beginning at the wrong end; you have admirable feeling about that prelude, but you needn’t think about feeling till you’ve got all the notes at your fingers’ ends. Then and not till then, you may begin to remember that you want to be a pianist. Now, what’s the next thing?”
Michael felt somewhat squashed and discouraged. He had thought he had really worked successfully at the thing he knew so well by sight. His heavy eyebrows drew together.
“You told me to harmonise that Christmas carol,” he remarked, rather shortly.
Falbe put his hand on his shoulder.
“Look here, Michael,” he said, “you’re vexed with me. Now, there’s nothing to be vexed at. You know quite well you were leaving out lots of notes from those jolly fat chords, and that you weren’t playing cleanly. Now I’m taking you seriously, and I won’t have from you anything but the best you can do. You’re not doing your best when you don’t even play what is written. You can’t begin to work at this till you do that.”
Michael had a moment’s severe tussle with his temper. He felt vexed and disappointed that Hermann should have sent him back like a schoolboy with his exercise torn over. Not immediately did he confess to himself that he was completely in the wrong.
“I’m doing the best I can,” he said. “It’s rather discouraging.”
He moved his big shoulders slightly, as if to indicate that Hermann’s hand was not wanted there. Hermann kept it there.
“It might be discouraging,” he said, “if you were doing your best.”
Michael’s ill-temper oozed from him.
“I’m wrong,” he said, turning round with the smile that made his ugly face so pleasant. “And I’m sorry both that I have been slack and that I’ve been sulky. Will that do?”
Falbe laughed.
“Very well indeed,” he said. “Now for ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ Wasn’t it—”
“Yes; I got awfully interested over it, Hermann. I thought I would try and work it up into a few variations.”
“Let’s hear,” said Falbe.
This was a vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure; it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid octaves, and finally asserted itself, heard once more, over a great scale base of bells.
Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done over Michael’s fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up with a certain excitement.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” he said. “You’ve done something that’s really good. Faults? Yes, millions; but there’s a first-rate imagination at the bottom of it. How did it happen?”
Michael flushed with pleasure.
“Oh, they sang themselves,” he said, “and I learned them. But will it really do? Is there anything in it?”
“Yes, old boy, there’s King Wenceslas in it, and you’ve dressed him up well. Play that last one again.”
The last one was taxing to the fingers, but Michael’s big hands banged out the octave scale in the bass with wonderful ease, and Falbe gave a great guffaw of pleasure at the rollicking conclusion.
“Write them all down,” he said, “and try if you can hear it singing half a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to play the lot at my concert in January.”
Michael gasped.
“You don’t mean that?” he said.
“Certainly I do. It’s a fine bit of stuff.”
It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits of the air—whatever those melodious sprites may be—had for the last month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now, as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing; their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed himself, and they haunted him no longer. At present he had but jotted down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of his own brain, setting Falbe his task.
But he felt much more than this. He had done something. Michael, the dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of music. All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate, unable, so it had seemed to him, to show himself, to let himself out. And not till now, when he had found this means of access, did he know how passionately he had desired it, nor how immensely, in the process of so doing, his desire had grown. He must find out more ways, other channels of projecting himself. The need for that, as of a diver throwing himself into the empty air and the laughing waters below him, suddenly took hold of him.
He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages, and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it:
VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.
By
Michael Comber.
He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.
“Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe,” he wrote at the top.
CHAPTER VII
Michael had been so engrossingly employed since his return to London in the autumn that the existence of other ties and other people apart from those immediately connected with his work had worn a very shadow-like aspect. He had, it is true, written with some regularity to his mother, finding, somewhat to his dismay, how very slight the common ground between them was for purposes of correspondence. He could outline the facts that he had been to several concerts, that he had seen much of his music-master, that he had been diligent at his work, but he realised that there was nothing in detail about those things that could possibly interest her, and that nothing except them really interested him. She on her side had little to say except to record the welfare of Petsy, to remark on the beauty of October, and tell him how many shooting parties they had had.
His correspondence with his father had been less frequent, and absolutely one-sided, since Lord Ashbridge took no notice at all of his letters. Michael regretted this, as showing that he was still outcast, but it cannot be said to have come between him and the sunshine, for he had begun to manufacture the sunshine within, that internal happiness which his environment and way of life produced, which seemed to be independent of all that was not directly connected with it. But a letter which he received next morning from his mother stated, in addition to the fact that Petsy had another of her tiresome bilious attacks (poor lamb), that his father and she thought it right that he should come down to Ashbridge for Christmas. It conveyed the sense that at this joyful season a truce, probably limited in duration, and, even while it lasted, of the nature of a strongly-armed neutrality, was proclaimed, but the prospect was not wholly encouraging, for Lady Ashbridge added that she hoped Michael would not “go on” vexing his father. What precisely Michael was expected to do in order to fulfil that wish was not further stated, but he wrote dutifully enough to say that he would come down at Christmas.
But the letter rekindled his dormant sense of there being other people in the world beside his immediate circle; also, indefinably, it gave him the sense that his mother wanted him. That should be so then, and sequentially he remembered with a pang of self-reproach that he had not as much as indicated his presence in London to Aunt Barbara, or set eyes on her since their meeting in August. He knew she was in London, since he had seen her name in some paragraph in the papers not long before, and instantly wrote to ask her to dine with him at a near date. Her answer was characteristic.
“Of course I’ll dine with you, my dear,” she wrote; “it will be delightful. And what has happened to you? Your letter actually conveyed a sense of cordiality. You never used to be cordial. And I wish to meet some of your nice friends. Ask one or two, please—a prima donna of some kind and a pianist, I think. I want them weird and original—the prima donna with short hair, and the pianist with long. In Tony’s new station in life I never see anybody except the sort of people whom your father likes. Are you forgiven yet, by the way?”
Michael found himself on the grin at the thought of Aunt Barbara suddenly encountering the two magnificent Falbes (prima donna and pianist exactly as she had desired) as representing the weird sort of people whom she pictured his living among, and the result quite came up to his expectations. As usual, Aunt Barbara was late, and came in talking rapidly about the various causes that had detained her, which her fruitful imagination had suggested to her as she dressed. In order, perhaps, to suit herself to the circle in which she would pass the evening, she had put on (or, rather, it looked as if her maid had thrown at her) a very awful sort of tea-gown, brown and prickly-looking, and adapted to Bohemian circles. She, with the same lively imagination, had pictured Michael in a velveteen coat and soft shirt, the pianist as very small, with spectacles and long hair, and the prima donna a full-blown kind of barmaid with Roman pearls. . . .
“Yes, my dear, I know I am late,” she began before she was inside the door, “but Og had so much to say, and there was a block at Hyde Park Corner. My dear Michael, how smart you look!”
She came round the corner of the screen and the Falbes burst upon her, Hermann and Sylvia standing by the fire. For the short, spectacled pianist there was this very tall, English-looking young man, upright and soldierly, with his handsome, boyish face and well-fitting clothes. That was bad enough, but infinitely worse was she who was to have been the full-blown barmaid. Instead was this magnificent girl, nearly as tall as her brother, with her small oval face crowning the column of her neck, her eyes merry, her mouth laughing at some brotherly retort that Hermann had just made. Aunt Barbara took her in with one second’s survey—her face, her neck, her beautiful dress, her whole air of ease and good-breeding, and gave a despairing glance at her own prickly tea-gown. For the moment, amiably accustomed as she was to laugh at herself, she did not find it humourous.
“Miss Sylvia Falbe, Aunt Barbara,” said Michael with a little tremor in his voice; “and Mr. Hermann Falbe, Lady Barbara Jerome,” he added, rather as if he expected nobody to believe it.
Aunt Barbara made the best of it: shook hands in her jolly manner, and burst into laughter.
“Michael, I could slay you,” she said; “but before I do that I must tell your friends all about it. This horrible nephew of mine, Miss Falbe, promised me two weird musicians, and I expected—I really can’t tell you what I expected—but there were to be spectacles and velveteen coats and the general air of an afternoon concert at Clapham Junction. But it is nice to be made such a fool of. I feel precisely like an elderly and sour governess who has been ordered to come down to dinner so that there shan’t be thirteen. Give me your arm, Mr. Falbe, and take me in to dinner at once, where I may drown my embarrassment in soup. Or does Michael go in first? Go on, wretch!”
Presently they were seated at dinner, and Aunt Barbara could not help enlarging a little on her own discomfiture.
“It is all your fault, Michael,” she said. “You have been in London all these weeks without letting me know anything about you or your friends, or what you were doing; so naturally I supposed you were leading some obscure kind of existence. Instead of which I find this sort of thing. My dear, what good soup! I shall see if I can’t induce your cook to leave you. But bachelors always have the best of everything. Now tell me about your visit to Germany. Which was the point where we parted—Baireuth, wasn’t it? I would not go to Baireuth with anybody!”
“I went with Mr. Falbe,” said Michael.
“Ah, Mr. Falbe has not asked me yet. I may have to revise what I say,” said Aunt Barbara daringly.
“I didn’t ask Michael,” said Hermann. “I got into his carriage as the train was moving; and my luggage was left behind.”
“I was left behind,” said Sylvia, “which was worse. But I sent Hermann’s luggage.”
“So expeditiously that it arrived the day before we left for Munich,” remarked Hermann.
“And that’s all the gratitude I get. But in the interval you lived upon Lord Comber.”
“I do still in the money I earn by giving him music lessons. Mike, have you finished the Variations yet?”
“Variations—what are Variations?” asked Aunt Barbara.
“Yes, two days ago. Variations are all the things you think about on the piano, Aunt Barbara, when you are playing a tune made by somebody else.”
“Should I like them? Will Mr. Falbe play them to me?” asked she.
“I daresay he will if he can. But I thought you loathed music.”
“It certainly depends on who makes it,” said Aunt Barbara. “I don’t like ordinary music, because the person who made it doesn’t matter to me. But if, so to speak, it sounds like somebody I know, it is a different matter.”
Michael turned to Sylvia.
“I want to ask your leave for something I have already done,” he said.
“And if I don’t give it you?”
“Then I shan’t tell you what it is.”
Sylvia looked at him with her candid friendly eyes. Her brother always told her that she never looked at anybody except her friends; if she was engaged in conversation with a man she did not like, she looked at his shirt-stud or at a point slightly above his head.
“Then, of course, I give in,” she said. “I must give you leave if otherwise I shan’t know what you have done. But it’s a mean trick. Tell me at once.”
“I’ve dedicated the Variations to you,” he said.
Sylvia flushed with pleasure.
“Oh, but that’s absolutely darling of you,” she said. “Have you, really? Do you mean it?”
“If you’ll allow me.”
“Allow you? Hermann, the Variations are mine. Isn’t it too lovely?”
It was at this moment that Aunt Barbara happened to glance at Michael, and it suddenly struck her that it was a perfectly new Michael whom she looked at. She knew and was secretly amused at the fiasco that always attended the introduction of amiable young ladies to Ashbridge, and had warned her sister-in-law that Michael, when he chose the girl he wanted, would certainly do it on his own initiative. Now she felt sure that Michael, though he might not be aware of it himself, was, even if he had not chosen, beginning to choose. There was that in his eyes which none of the importations to Ashbridge had ever seen there, that eager deferential attention, which shows that a young man is interested because it is a girl he is talking to. That, she knew, had never been characteristic of Michael; indeed, it would not have been far from the truth to say that the fact that he was talking to a girl was sufficient to make his countenance wear an expression of polite boredom. Then for a while, as dinner progressed, she doubted the validity of her conclusion, for the Michael who was entertaining her to-night was wholly different from the Michael she had known and liked and pitied. She felt that she did not know this new one yet, but she was certain that she liked him, and equally sure that she did not pity him at all. He had found his place, he had found his work; he evidently fitted into his life, which, after all, is the surest ground of happiness, and it might be that it was only general joy, so to speak, that kindled that pleasant fire in his face. And then once more she went back to her first conclusion, for talking to Michael herself she saw, as a woman so infallibly sees, that he gave her but the most superficial attention—sufficient, indeed, to allow him to answer intelligently and laugh at the proper places, but his mind was not in the least occupied with her. If Sylvia moved his glance flickered across in her direction: it was she who gave him his alertness. Aunt Barbara felt that she could have told him truthfully that he was in love with her, and she rather thought that it would be news to him; probably he did not know it yet himself. And she wondered what his father would say when he knew it.
“And then Munich,” she said, violently recalling Michael’s attention towards her. “Munich I could have borne better than Baireuth, and when Mr. Falbe asks me there I shall probably go. Your Uncle Tony was in Germany then, by the way; he went over at the invitation of the Emperor to the manoeuvres.”
“Did he? The Emperor came to Munich for a day during them. He was at the opera,” said Michael.
“You didn’t speak to him, I suppose?” she asked.
“Yes; he sent for me, and talked a lot. In fact, he talked too much, because I didn’t hear a note of the second act.”
Aunt Barbara became infinitely more interested.
“Tell me all about it, Michael,” she said. “What did he talk about?”
“Everything, as far as I can remember, England, Ashbridge, armies, navies, music. Hermann says he cast pearls before swine—”
“And his tone, his attitude?” she asked.
“Towards us?—towards England? Immensely friendly, and most inquisitive. I was never asked so many questions in so short a time.”
Aunt Barbara suddenly turned to Falbe.
“And you?” she asked. “Were you with Michael?”
“No, Lady Barbara. I had no pearls.”
“And are you naturalised English?” she asked.
“No; I am German.”
She slid swiftly off the topic.
“Do you wonder I ask, with your talking English so perfectly?” she said. “You should hear me talking French when we are entertaining Ambassadors and that sort of persons. I talk it so fast that nobody can understand a word I say. That is a defensive measure, you must observe, because even if I talked it quite slowly they would understand just as little. But they think it is the pace that stupefies them, and they leave me in a curious, dazed condition. And now Miss Falbe and I are going to leave you two. Be rather a long time, dear Michael, so that Mr. Falbe can tell you what he thinks of me, and his sister shall tell me what she thinks of you. Afterwards you and I will tell each other, if it is not too fearful.”
This did not express quite accurately Lady Barbara’s intentions, for she chiefly wanted to find out what she thought of Sylvia.
“And you are great friends, you three?” she said as they settled themselves for the prolonged absence of the two men.
Sylvia smiled; she smiled, Aunt Barbara noticed, almost entirely with her eyes, using her mouth only when it came to laughing; but her eyes smiled quite charmingly.
“That’s always rather a rash thing to pronounce on,” she said. “I can tell you for certain that Hermann and I are both very fond of him, but it is presumptuous for us to say that he is equally devoted to us.”
“My dear, there is no call for modesty about it,” said Barbara. “Between you—for I imagine it is you who have done it—between you you have made a perfectly different creature of the boy. You’ve made him flower.”
Sylvia became quite grave.
“Oh, I do hope he likes us,” she said. “He is so likable himself.”
Barbara nodded
“And you’ve had the good sense to find that out,” she said. “It’s astonishing how few people knew it. But then, as I said, Michael hadn’t flowered. No one understood him, or was interested. Then he suddenly made up his mind last summer what he wanted to do and be, and immediately did and was it.”
“I think he told Hermann,” said she. “His father didn’t approve, did he?”
“Approve? My dear, if you knew my brother you would know that the only things he approves of are those which Michael isn’t.”
Sylvia spread her fine hands out to the blaze, warming them and shading her face.
“Michael always seems to us—” she began. “Ah, I called him Michael by mistake.”
“Then do it on purpose next time,” remarked Barbara. “What does Michael seem?”
“Ah, but don’t let him know I called him Michael,” said Sylvia in some horror. “There is nothing so awful as to speak of people formally to their faces, and intimately behind their backs. But Hermann is always talking of him as Michael.”
“And Michael always seems—”
“Oh, yes; he always seems to me to have been part of us, of Hermann and me, for years. He’s THERE, if you know what I mean, and so few people are there. They walk about your life, and go in and out, so to speak, but Michael stops. I suppose it’s because he is so natural.”
Aunt Barbara had been a diplomatist long before her husband, and fearful of appearing inquisitive about Sylvia’s impression of Michael, which she really wanted to inquire into, instantly changed the subject.
“Ah, everybody who has got definite things to do is natural,” she said. “It is only the idle people who have leisure to look at themselves in the glass and pose. And I feel sure that you have definite things to do and plenty of them, my dear. What are they?”
“Oh, I sing a little,” said Sylvia.
“That is the first unnatural thing you have said. I somehow feel that you sing a great deal.”
Aunt Barbara suddenly got up.
“My dear, you are not THE Miss Falbe, are you, who drove London crazy with delight last summer. Don’t tell me you are THE Miss Falbe?”
Sylvia laughed.
“Do you know, I’m afraid I must be,” she said. “Isn’t it dreadful to have to say that after your description?”
Aunt Barbara sat down again, in a sort of calm despair.
“If there are any more shocks coming for me to-night,” she said, “I think I had better go home. I have encountered a perfectly new nephew Michael. I have dressed myself like a suburban housekeeper to meet a Poiret, so don’t deny it, and having humourously told Michael I wished to see a prima donna and a pianist, he takes me at my word and produces THE Miss Falbe. I’m glad I knew that in time; I should infallibly have asked you to sing, and if you had done so—you are probably good-natured enough to have done even that—I should have given the drawing-room gasp at the end, and told your brother that I thought you sang very prettily.”
Sylvia laughed.
“But really it wasn’t my fault, Lady Barbara,” she said. “When we met I couldn’t have said, ‘Beware! I am THE Miss Falbe.’”
“No, my dear; but I think you ought, somehow, to have conveyed the impression that you were a tremendous swell. You didn’t. I have been thinking of you as a charming girl, and nothing more.”
“But that’s quite good enough for me,” said Sylvia.
The two young men joined them after this, and Hermann speedily became engrossed in reading the finished Variations. Some of these pleased him mightily; one he altogether demurred to.
“It’s just a crib, Mike,” he said. “The critics would say I had forgotten it, and put in instead what I could remember of a variation out of the Handel theme. That next one’s, oh, great fun. But I wish you would remember that we all haven’t got great orang-outang paws like you.”
Aunt Barbara stopped in the middle of her sentence; she knew Michael’s old sensitiveness about these physical disabilities, and she had a moment’s cold horror at the thought of Falbe having said so miserably tactless a thing to him. But the horror was of infinitesimal duration, for she heard Michael’s laugh as they leaned over the top of the piano together.
“I wish you had, Hermann,” he said. “I know you’ll bungle those tenths.”
Falbe moved to the piano-seat.
“Oh, let’s have a shot at it,” he said. “If Lady Barbara won’t mind, play that one through to me first, Mike.”
“Oh, presently, Hermann,” he said. “It makes such an infernal row that you can’t hear anything else afterwards. Do sing, Miss Sylvia; my aunt won’t really mind—will you, Aunt Barbara?”
“Michael, I have just learned that this is THE Miss Falbe,” she said. “I am suffering from shock. Do let me suffer from coals of fire, too.”
Michael gently edged Hermann away from the music-stool. Much as he enjoyed his master’s accompaniment he was perfectly sure that he preferred, if possible, to play for Sylvia himself than have the pleasure of listening to anybody else.
“And may I play for you, Miss Sylvia?” he asked.
“Yes, will you? Thanks, Lord Comber.”
Hermann moved away.
“And so Mr. Hermann sits down by Lady Barbara while Lord Comber plays for Miss Sylvia,” he observed, with emphasis on the titles.
A sudden amazing boldness seized Michael.
“Sylvia, then,” he said.
“All right, Michael,” answered the girl, laughing.
She came and stood on the left of the piano, slightly behind him.
“And what are we going to have?” asked Michael.
“It must be something we both know, for I’ve brought no music,” said she.
Michael began playing the introduction to the Hugo Wolff song which he had accompanied for her one Sunday night at their house. He knew it perfectly by heart, but stumbled a little over the difficult syncopated time. This was not done without purpose, for the next moment he felt her hand on his shoulder marking it for him.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Now you’ve got it.” And Michael smiled sweetly at his own amazing ingenuity.
Hermann put down the Variations, which he still had in his hand, when Sylvia’s voice began. Unaccustomed as she was to her accompanist, his trained ear told him that she was singing perfectly at ease, and was completely at home with her player. Occasionally she gave Michael some little indication, as she had done before, but for the most part her fingers rested immobile on his shoulder, and he seemed to understand her perfectly. Somehow this was a surprise to him; he had not known that Michael possessed that sort of second-sight that unerringly feels and translates into the keys the singer’s mood. For himself he always had to attend most closely when he was playing for his sister, but familiar as he was with her singing, he felt that Michael divined her certainly as well as himself, and he listened to the piano more than to the voice.
“You extraordinary creature,” he said when the song was over. “Where did you learn to accompany?”
Suddenly Michael felt an access of shyness, as if he had been surprised when he thought himself private.
“Oh, I’ve played it before for Miss—I mean for Sylvia,” he said.
Then he turned to the girl.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “And I’m greedy. May we have one more?”
He slid into the opening bars of “Who is Sylvia?” That song, since he had heard her sing it at her recital in the summer, had grown in significance to him, even as she had. It had seemed part of her then, but then she was a stranger. To-night it was even more intimately part of her, and she was a friend.
Hermann strolled across to the fireplace at the end of this, and lit a cigarette.
“My sister’s a blatant egoist, Lady Barbara,” he said. “She loves singing about herself. And she lays it on pretty thick, too, doesn’t she? Now, Sylvia, if you’ve finished—quite finished, I mean—do come and sit down and let me try these Variations—”
“Shall we surrender, Michael?” asked the girl. “Or shall we stick to the piano, now we’ve got it? If Hermann once sits down, you know, we shan’t get him away for the rest of the evening. I can’t sing any more, but we might play a duet to keep him out.”
Hermann rushed to the piano, took his sister by the shoulders, and pushed her into a chair.
“You sit there,” he said, “and listen to something not about yourself. Michael, if you don’t come away from that piano, I shall take Sylvia home at once. Now you may all talk as much as you like; you won’t interrupt me one atom—but you’ll have to talk loud in certain parts.”
Then a feat of marvellous execution began. Michael had taken an evil pleasure in giving his master, for whom he slaved with so unwearied a diligence, something that should tax his powers, and he gave a great crash of laughter when for a moment Hermann was brought to a complete standstill in an octave passage of triplets against quavers, and the performer exultantly joined in it, as he pushed his hair back from his forehead, and made a second attempt.
“It isn’t decent to ask a fellow to read that,” he shouted. “It’s a crime; it’s a scandal.”
“My dear, nobody asked you to read it,” said Sylvia.
“Silence, you chit! Mike, come here a minute. Sit down one second and play that. Promise to get up again, though, immediately. Just these three bars—yes, I see. An orang-outang apparently can do it, so why not I? Am I not much better than they? Go away, please; or, rather, stop there and turn over. Why couldn’t you have finished the page with the last act, and started this one fresh, instead of making this Godforsaken arrangement? Now!”
A very simple little minuet measure followed this outrageous passage, and Hermann’s exquisite lightness of touch made it sound strangely remote, as if from a mile away, or a hundred years ago, some graceful echo was evoked again. Then the little dirge wept for the memories of something that had never happened, and leaving out the number he disapproved of, as reminiscent of the Handel theme, Hermann gathered himself up again for the assertion of the original tune, with its bars of scale octaves. The contagious jollity of it all seized the others, and Sylvia, with full voice, and Aunt Barbara, in a strange hooting, sang to it.
Then Hermann banged out the last chord, and jumped up from his seat, rolling up the music.
“I go straight home,” he said, “and have a peaceful hour with it. Michael, old boy, how did you do it? You’ve been studying seriously for a few months only, and so this must all have been in you before. And you’ve come to the age you are without letting any of it out. I suppose that’s why it has come with a rush. You knew it all along, while you were wasting your time over drilling your toy soldiers. Come on, Sylvia, or I shall go without you. Good night, Lady Barbara. Half-past ten to-morrow, Michael.”
Protest was clearly useless; and, having seen the two off, Michael came upstairs again to Aunt Barbara, who had no intention of going away just yet.
“And so these are the people you have been living with,” she said. “No wonder you had not time to come and see me. Do they always go that sort of pace—it is quicker than when I talk French.”
Michael sank into a chair.
“Oh, yes, that’s Hermann all over,” he said. “But—but just think what it means to me! He’s going to play my tunes at his concert. Michael Comber, Op. 1. O Lord! O Lord!”
“And you just met him in the train?” said Aunt Barbara.
“Yes; second class, Victoria Station, with Sylvia on the platform. I didn’t much notice Sylvia then.”
This and the inference that naturally followed was as much as could be expected, and Aunt Barbara did not appear to wait for anything more on the subject of Sylvia. She had seen sufficient of the situation to know where Michael was most certainly bound for. Yet the very fact of Sylvia’s outspoken friendliness with him made her wonder a little as to what his reception would be. She would hardly have said so plainly that she and her brother were devoted to him if she had been devoted to him with that secret tenderness which, in its essentials, is reticent about itself. Her half-hour’s conversation with the girl had given her a certain insight into her; still more had her attitude when she stood by Michael as he played for her, and put her hand on his shoulder precisely as she would have done if it had been another girl who was seated at the piano. Without doubt Michael had a real existence for her, but there was no sign whatever that she hailed it, as a girl so unmistakably does, when she sees it as part of herself.
“More about them,” she said. “What are they? Who are they?”
He outlined for her, giving the half-English, half-German parentage, the shadow-like mother, the Bavarian father, Sylvia’s sudden and comet-like rising in the musical heaven, while her brother, seven years her senior, had spent his time in earning in order to give her the chance which she had so brilliantly taken. Now it was to be his turn, the shackles of his drudgery no longer impeded him, and he, so Michael radiantly prophesied, was to have his rocket-like leap to the zenith, also.
“And he’s German?” she asked.
“Yes. Wasn’t he rude about my being a toy soldier? But that’s the natural German point of view, I suppose.”
Michael strolled to the fireplace.
“Hermann’s so funny,” he said. “For days and weeks together you would think he was entirely English, and then a word slips from him like that, which shows he is entirely German. He was like that in Munich, when the Emperor appeared and sent for me.”
Aunt Barbara drew her chair a little nearer the fire, and sat up.
“I want to hear about that,” she said.
“But I’ve told you; he was tremendously friendly in a national manner.”
“And that seemed to you real?” she asked.
Michael considered.
“I don’t know that it did,” he said. “It all seemed to me rather feverish, I think.”
“And he asked quantities of questions, I think you said.”
“Hundreds. He was just like what he was when he came to Ashbridge. He reviewed the Yeomanry, and shot pheasants, and spent the afternoon in a steam launch, apparently studying the deep-water channel of the river, where it goes underneath my father’s place; and then in the evening there was a concert.”
Aunt Barbara did not heed the concert.
“Do you mean the channel up from Harwich,” she asked, “of which the Admiralty have the secret chart?”
“I fancy they have,” said Michael. “And then after the concert there was the torchlight procession, with the bonfire on the top of the hill.”
“I wasn’t there. What else?”
“I think that’s all,” said Michael. “But what are you driving at, Aunt Barbara?”
She was silent a moment.
“I’m driving at this,” she said. “The Germans are accumulating a vast quantity of knowledge about England. Tony, for instance, has a German valet, and when he went down to Portsmouth the other day to see the American ship that was there, he took him with him. And the man took a camera and was found photographing where no photography is allowed. Did you see anything of a camera when the Emperor came to Ashbridge?”
Michael thought.
“Yes; one of his staff was clicking away all day,” he said. “He sent a lot of them to my mother.”
“And, we may presume, kept some copies himself,” remarked Aunt Barbara drily. “Really, for childish simplicity the English are the biggest fools in creation.”
“But do you mean—”
“I mean that the Germans are a very knowledge-seeking people, and that we gratify their desires in a very simple fashion. Do you think they are so friendly, Michael? Do you know, for instance, what is a very common toast in German regimental messes? They do not drink it when there are foreigners there, but one night during the manoeuvres an officer in a mess where Tony was dining got slightly ‘on,’ as you may say, and suddenly drank to ‘Der Tag.’”
“That means ‘The Day,’” said Michael confidently.
“It does; and what day? The day when Germany thinks that all is ripe for a war with us. ‘Der Tag’ will dawn suddenly from a quiet, peaceful night, when they think we are all asleep, and when they have got all the information they think is accessible. War, my dear.”
Michael had never in his life seen his aunt so serious, and he was amazed at her gravity.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of their spies all over England,” she said, “and hundreds of their agents all over America. Deep, patient Germany, as Carlyle said. She’s as patient as God and as deep as the sea. They are working, working, while our toy soldiers play golf. I agree with that adorable pianist; and, what’s more, I believe they think that ‘Der Tag’ is near to dawn. Tony says that their manoeuvres this year were like nothing that has ever been seen before. Germany is a fighting machine without parallel in the history of the world.”
She got up and stood with Michael near the fireplace.
“And they think their opportunity is at hand,” she said, “though not for a moment do they relax their preparations. We are their real enemy, don’t you see? They can fight France with one hand and Russia with the other; and in a few months’ time now they expect we shall be in the throes of an internal revolution over this Irish business. They may be right, but there is just the possibility that they may be astoundingly wrong. The fact of the great foreign peril—this nightmare, this Armageddon of European war—may be exactly that which will pull us together. But their diplomatists, anyhow, are studying the Irish question very closely, and German gold, without any doubt at all, is helping the Home Rule party. As a nation we are fast asleep. I wonder what we shall be like when we wake. Shall we find ourselves already fettered when we wake, or will there be one moment, just one moment, in which we can spring up? At any rate, hitherto, the English have always been at their best, not their worst, in desperate positions. They hate exciting themselves, and refuse to do it until the crisis is actually on them. But then they become disconcertingly serious and cool-headed.”
“And you think the Emperor—” began Michael.
“I think the Emperor is the hardest worker in all Germany,” said Barbara. “I believe he is trying (and admirably succeeding) to make us trust his professions of friendship. He has a great eye for detail, too; it seemed to him worth while to assure you even, my dear Michael, of his regard and affection for England. He was always impressing on Tony the same thing, though to him, of course, he said that if there was any country nearer to his heart than England it was America. Stuff and nonsense, my dear!”
All this, though struck in a more serious key than was usual with Aunt Barbara, was quite characteristic of her. She had the quality of mind which when occupied with one idea is occupied with it to the exclusion of all others; she worked at full power over anything she took up. But now she dismissed it altogether.
“You see what a diplomatist I have become,” she said. “It is a fascinating business: one lives in an atmosphere that is charged with secret affairs, and it infects one like the influenza. You catch it somehow, and have a feverish cold of your own. And I am quite useful to him. You see, I am such a chatterbox that people think I let out things by accident, which I never do. I let out what I want to let out on purpose, and they think they are pumping me. I had a long conversation the other day with one of the German Embassy, all about Irish affairs. They are hugely interested about Irish affairs, and I just make a note of that; but they can make as many notes as they please about what I say, and no one will be any the wiser. In fact, they will be the foolisher. And now I suppose I had better take myself away.”
“Don’t do anything of the kind,” said Michael.
“But I must. And if when you are down at Ashbridge at Christmas you find strangers hanging about the deep-water reach, you might just let me know. It’s no use telling your father, because he will certainly think they have come to get a glimpse of him as he plays golf. But I expect you’ll be too busy thinking about that new friend of yours, and perhaps his sister. What did she tell me we had got to do? ‘To her garlands let us bring,’ was it not? You and I will both send wreaths, Michael, though not for her funeral. Now don’t be a hermit any more, but come and see me. You shall take your garland girl into dinner, if she will come, too; and her brother shall certainly sit next me. I am so glad you have become yourself at last. Go on being yourself more and more, my dear: it suits you.”
CHAPTER VIII
Some fortnight later, and not long before Michael was leaving town for his Christmas visit to Ashbridge, Sylvia and her brother were lingering in the big studio from which the last of their Sunday evening guests had just departed. The usual joyous chaos consequent on those entertainments reigned: the top of the piano was covered with the plates and glasses of those who had made an alfresco supper (or breakfast) of fried bacon and beer before leaving; a circle of cushions were ranged on the floor round the fire, for it was a bitterly cold night, and since, for some reason, a series of charades had been spontaneously generated, there was lying about an astonishing collection of pillow-cases, rugs, and table-cloths, and such articles of domestic and household use as could be converted into clothes for this purpose. But the event of the evening had undoubtedly been Hermann’s performance of the “Wenceslas Variations”; these he had now learned, and, as he had promised Michael, was going to play them at his concert in the Steinway Hall in January. To-night a good many musician friends had attended the Sunday evening gathering, and there had been no two opinions about the success of them.
“I was talking to Arthur Lagden about them,” said Falbe, naming a prominent critic of the day, “and he would hardly believe that they were an Opus I., or that Michael had not been studying music technically for years instead of six months. But that’s the odd thing about Mike; he’s so mature.”
It was not unusual for the brother and sister to sit up like this, till any hour, after their guests had gone; and Sylvia collected a bundle of cushions and lay full length on the floor, with her feet towards the fire. For both of them the week was too busy on six days for them to indulge that companionship, sometimes full of talk, sometimes consisting of those dropped words and long silences, on which intimacy lives; and they both enjoyed, above all hours in the week, this time that lay between the friendly riot of Sunday evening and the starting of work again on Monday. There was between them that bond which can scarcely exist between husband and wife, since it almost necessarily implies the close consanguinity of brother and sister, and postulates a certain sort of essential community of nature, founded not on tastes, nor even on affection, but on the fact that the same blood beats in the two. Here an intense affection, too strong to be ever demonstrative, fortified it, and both brother and sister talked to each other, as if they were speaking to some physically independent piece of themselves.
Sylvia had nothing apparently to add on the subject of Michael’s maturity. Instead she just raised her head, which was not quite high enough.
“Stuff another cushion under my head, Hermann,” she said. “Thanks; now I’m completely comfortable, you will be relieved to hear.”
Hermann gazed at the fire in silence.
“That’s a weight off my mind,” he said. “About Michael now. He’s been suppressed all his life, you know, and instead of being dwarfed he has just gone on growing inside. Good Lord! I wish somebody would suppress me for a year or two. What a lot there would be when I took the cork out again. We dissipate too much, Sylvia, both you and I.”
She gave a little grunt, which, from his knowledge of her inarticulate expressions, he took to mean dissent.
“I suppose you mean we don’t,” he remarked.
“Yes. How much one dissipates is determined for one just as is the shape of your nose or the colour of your eyes. By the way, I fell madly in love with that cousin of Michael’s who came with him to-night. He’s the most attractive creature I ever saw in my life. Of course, he’s too beautiful: no boy ought to be as beautiful as that.”
“You flirted with him,” remarked Hermann. “Mike will probably murder him on the way home.”
Sylvia moved her feet a little farther from the blaze.
“Funny?” she asked.
Instantly Falbe knew that her mind was occupied with exactly the same question as his.
“No, not funny at all,” he said. “Quite serious. Do you want to talk about it or not?”
She gave a little groan.
“No, I don’t want to, but I’ve got to,” she said. “Aunt Barbara—we became Sylvia and Aunt Barbara an hour or two ago, and she’s a dear—Aunt Barbara has been talking to me about it already.”
“And what did Aunt Barbara say?”
“Just what you are going to,” said Sylvia; “namely, that I had better make up my mind what I mean to say when Michael says what he means to say.”
She shifted round so as to face her brother as he stood in front of the fire, and pulled his trouser-leg more neatly over the top of his shoe.
“But what’s to happen if I can’t make up my mind?” she said. “I needn’t tell you how much I like Michael; I believe I like him as much as I possibly can. But I don’t know if that is enough. Hermann, is it enough? You ought to know. There’s no use in you unless you know about me.”
She put out her arm, and clasped his two legs in the crook of her elbow. That expressed their attitude, what they were to each other, as absolutely as any physical demonstration allowed. Had there not been the difference of sex which severed them she could never have got the sense of support that this physical contact gave her; had there not been her sisterhood to chaperon her, so to speak, she could never have been so at ease with a man. The two were lover-like, without the physical apexes and limitations that physical love must always bring with it. The complement of sex that brought them so close annihilated the very existence of sex. They loved as only brother and sister can love, without trouble.
The closer contact of his fire-warmed trousers to the calf of his leg made Hermann step out of her encircling arm without any question of hurting her feelings.
“I won’t be burned,” he said. “Sorry, but I won’t be burned. It seems to me, Sylvia, that you ought to like Michael a little more and a little less.”
“It’s no use saying what I ought to do,” she said. “The idea of what I ‘ought’ doesn’t come in. I like him just as much as I like him, neither more nor less.”
He clawed some more cushions together, and sat down on the floor by her. She raised herself a little and rested her body against his folded knees.
“What’s the trouble, Sylvia?” he said.
“Just what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Be more concrete, then. You’re definite enough when you sing.”
She sighed and gave a little melancholy laugh.
“That’s just it,” she said. “People like you and me, and Michael, too, for that matter, are most entirely ourselves when we are at our music. When Michael plays for me I can sing my soul at him. While he and I are in music, if you understand—and of course you do—we belong to each other. Do you know, Hermann, he finds me when I’m singing, without the slightest effort, and even you, as you have so often told me, have to search and be on the lookout. And then the song is over, and, as somebody says, ‘When the feast is finished and the lamps expire,’ then—well, the lamps expire, and he isn’t me any longer, but Michael, with the—the ugly face, and—oh, isn’t it horrible of me—the long arms and the little stumpy legs—if only he was rather different in things that don’t matter, that CAN’T matter! But—but, Hermann, if only Michael was rather like you, and you like Michael, I should love you exactly as much as ever, and I should love Michael, too.”
She was leaning forward, and with both hands was very carefully tying and untying one of Hermann’s shoelaces.
“Oh, thank goodness there is somebody in the world to whom I can say just whatever I feel, and know he understands,” she said. “And I know this, too—and follow me here, Hermann—I know that all that doesn’t really matter; I am sure it doesn’t. I like Michael far too well to let it matter. But there are other things which I don’t see my way through, and they are much more real—”
She was silent again, so long that Hermann reached out for a cigarette, lit it, and threw away the match before she spoke.
“There is Michael’s position,” she said. “When Michael asks me if I will have him, as we both know he is going to do, I shall have to make conditions. I won’t give up my career. I must go on working—in other words, singing—whether I marry him or not. I don’t call it singing, in my sense of the word, to sing ‘The Banks of Allan Water’ to Michael and his father and mother at Ashbridge, any more than it is being a politician to read the morning papers and argue about the Irish question with you. To have a career in politics means that you must be a member of Parliament—I daresay the House of Lords would do—and make speeches and stand the racket. In the same way, to be a singer doesn’t mean to sing after dinner or to go squawking anyhow in a workhouse, but it means to get up on a platform before critical people, and if you don’t do your very best be damned by them. If I marry Michael I must go on singing as a professional singer, and not become an amateur—the Viscountess Comber, who sings so charmingly. I refuse to sing charmingly; I will either sing properly or not at all. And I couldn’t not sing. I shall have to continue being Miss Falbe, so to speak.”
“You say you insist on it,” said Hermann; “but whether you did or not, there is nothing more certain than that Michael would.”
“I am sure he would. But by so doing he would certainly quarrel irrevocably with his people. Even Aunt Barbara, who, after all, is very liberally minded, sees that. They can none of them, not even she, who are born to a certain tradition imagine that there are other traditions quite as stiff-necked. Michael, it is true, was born to one tradition, but he has got the other, as he has shown very clearly by refusing to disobey it. He will certainly, as you say, insist on my endorsing the resolution he has made for himself. What it comes to is this, that I can’t marry him without his father’s complete consent to all that I have told you. I can’t have my career disregarded, covered up with awkward silences, alluded to as a painful subject; and, as I say, even Aunt Barbara seemed to take it for granted that if I became Lady Comber I should cease to be Miss Falbe. Well, there she’s wrong, my dear; I shall continue to be Miss Falbe whether I’m Lady Comber, or Lady Ashbridge, or the Duchess of anything you please. And—here the difficulty really comes in—they must all see how right I am. Difficulty, did I say? It’s more like an impossibility.”
Hermann threw the end of his cigarette into the ashes of the dying fire.
“It’s clear, then,” he said, “you have made up your mind not to marry him.”
She shook her head.
“Oh, Hermann, you fail me,” she said. “If I had made up my mind not to I shouldn’t have kept you up an hour talking about it.”
He stretched his hands out towards the embers already coated with grey ash.
“Then it’s like that with you,” he said, pointing. “If there is the fire in you, it is covered up with ashes.”
She did not reply for a moment.
“I think you’ve hit it there,” she said. “I believe there is the fire; when, as I said, he plays for me I know there is. But the ashes? What are they? And who shall disperse them for me?”
She stood up swiftly, drawing herself to her full height and stretching her arms out.
“There’s something bigger than we know coming,” she said. “Whether it’s storm or sunshine I have no idea. But there will be something that shall utterly sever Michael and me or utterly unite us.”
“Do you care which it is?” he asked.
“Yes, I care,” said she.
He held out his hands to her, and she pulled him up to his feet.
“What are you going to say, then, when he asks you?” he said.
“Tell him he must wait.”
He went round the room putting out the electric lamps and opening the big skylight in the roof. There was a curtain in front of this, which he pulled aside, and from the frosty cloudless heavens the starshine of a thousand constellations filtered down.
“That’s a lot to ask of any man,” he said. “If you care, you care.”
“And if you were a girl you would know exactly what I mean,” she said. “They may know they care, but, unless they are marrying for perfectly different reasons, they have to feel to the end of their fingers that they care before they can say ‘Yes.’”
He opened the door for her to pass out, and they walked up the passage together arm-in-arm.
“Well, perhaps Michael won’t ask you,” he said, “in which case all bother will be saved, and we shall have sat up talking till—Sylvia, did you know it is nearly three—sat up talking for nothing!”
Sylvia considered this.
“Fiddlesticks!” she said.
And Hermann was inclined to agree with her.
This view of the case found confirmation next day, for Michael, after his music lesson, lingered so firmly and determinedly when the three chatted together over the fire that in the end Hermann found nothing to do but to leave them together. Sylvia had given him no sign as to whether she wished him to absent himself or not, and he concluded, since she did not put an end to things by going away herself, that she intended Michael to have his say.
The latter rose as the door closed behind Hermann, and came and stood in front of her. And at the moment Sylvia could notice nothing of him except his heaviness, his plainness, all the things that she had told herself before did not really matter. Now her sensation contradicted that; she was conscious that the ash somehow had vastly accumulated over her fire, that all her affection and regard for him were suddenly eclipsed. This was a complete surprise to her; for the moment she found Michael’s presence and his proximity to her simply distasteful.
“I thought Hermann was never going,” he said.
For a second or two she did not reply; it was clearly no use to continue the ordinary banter of conversation, to suggest that as the room was Hermann’s he might conceivably be conceded the right to stop there if he chose. There was no transition possible between the affairs of every day and the affair for which Michael had stopped to speak. She gave up all attempt to make one; instead, she just helped him.
“What is it, Michael?” she asked.
Then to her, at any rate, Michael’s face completely changed. There burned in it all of a sudden the full glow of that of which she had only seen glimpses.
“You know,” he said.
His shyness, his awkwardness, had all vanished; the time had come for him to offer to her all that he had to offer, and he did it with the charm of perfect manliness and simplicity.
“Whether you can accept me or not,” he said, “I have just to tell you that I am entirely yours. Is there any chance for me, Sylvia?”
He stood quite still, making no movement towards her. She, on her side, found all her distaste of him suddenly vanished in the mere solemnity of the occasion. His very quietness told her better than any protestations could have done of the quality of what he offered, and that quality vastly transcended all that she had known or guessed of him.
“I don’t know, Michael,” she said at length.
She came a step forward, and without any sense of embarrassment found that she, without conscious intention, had put her hands on his shoulders. The moment that was done she was conscious of the impulse that made her do it. It expressed what she felt.
“Yes, I feel like that to you,” she said. “You’re a dear. I expect you know how fond I am of you, and if you don’t I assure you of it now. But I have got to give you more than that.”
Michael looked up at her.
“Yes, Sylvia,” he said, “much more than that.”
A few minutes ago only she had not liked him at all; now she liked him immensely.
“But how, Michael?” she asked. “How can I find it?”
“Oh, it’s I who have got to find it for you,” he said. “That is to say, if you want it to be found. Do you?”
She looked at him gravely, without the tremor of a smile in her eyes.
“What does that mean exactly?” she said.
“It is very simple. Do you want to love me?”
She did not move her hands; they still rested on his shoulders like things at ease, like things at home.
“Yes, I suppose I want to,” she said.
“And is that the most you can do for me at present?” he asked.
That reached her again; all the time the plain words, the plain face, the quiet of him stabbed her with daggers of which he had no idea. She was dismayed at the recollection of her talk with her brother the evening before, of the ease and certitude with which she had laid down her conditions, of not giving up her career, of remaining the famous Miss Falbe, of refusing to take a dishonoured place in the sacred circle of the Combers. Now, when she was face to face with his love, so ineloquently expressed, so radically a part of him, she knew that there was nothing in the world, external to him and her, that could enter into their reckonings; but into their reckonings there had not entered the one thing essential. She gave him sympathy, liking, friendliness, but she did not want him with her blood. And though it was not humanly possible that she could want him with more than that, it was not possible that she could take him with less.
“Yes, that is the most I can do for you at present,” she said.
Still quite quietly he moved away from her, so that he stood free of her hands.
“I have been constantly here all these last months,” he said. “Now that you know what I have told you, do you want not to see me?”
That stabbed her again.
“Have I implied that?” she asked.
“Not directly. But I can easily understand its being a bore to you. I don’t want to bore you. That would be a very stupid way of trying to make you care for me. As I said, that is my job. I haven’t accomplished it as yet. But I mean to. I only ask you for a hint.”
She understood her own feeling better than he. She understood at least that she was dealing with things that were necessarily incalculable.
“I can’t give you a hint,” she said. “I can’t make any plans about it. If you were a woman perhaps you would understand. Love is, or it isn’t. That is all I know about it.”
But Michael persisted.
“I only know what you have taught me,” he said. “But you must know that.”
In a flash she became aware that it would be impossible for her to behave to Michael as she had behaved to him for several months past. She could not any longer put a hand on his shoulder, beat time with her fingers on his arm, knowing that the physical contact meant nothing to her, and all—all to him. The rejection of him as a lover rendered the sisterly attitude impossible. And not only must she revise her conduct, but she must revise the mental attitude of which it was the physical counterpart. Up till this moment she had looked at the situation from her own side only, had felt that no plans could be made, that the natural thing was to go on as before, with the intimacy that she liked and the familiarity that was the obvious expression of it. But now she began to see the question from his side; she could not go on doing that which meant nothing particular to her, if that insouciance meant something so very particular to him. She realised that if she had loved him the touch of his hand, the proximity of his face would have had significance for her, a significance that would have been intolerable unless there was something mutual and secret between them. It had seemed so easy, in anticipation, to tell him that he must wait, so simple for him just—well, just to wait until she could make up her mind. She believed, as she had told her brother, that she cared for Michael, or as she had told him that she wanted to—the two were to the girl’s mind identical, though expressed to each in the only terms that were possible—but until she came face to face with the picture of the future, that to her wore the same outline and colour as the past, she had not known the impossibility of such a presentment. The desire of the lover on Michael’s part rendered unthinkable the sisterly attitude on hers. That her instinct told her, but her reason revolted against it.
“Can’t we go on as we were, Michael?” she said.
He looked at her incredulously.
“Oh, no, of course not that,” he said.
She moved a step towards him.
“I can’t think of you in any other way,” she said, as if making an appeal.
He stood absolutely unresponsive. Something within him longed that she should advance a step more, that he should again have the touch of her hands on his shoulders, but another instinct stronger than that made him revoke his desire, and if she had moved again he would certainly have fallen back before her.
“It may seem ridiculous to you,” he said, “since you do not care. But I can’t do that. Does that seem absurd to you I? I am afraid it does; but that is because you don’t understand. By all means let us be what they call excellent friends. But there are certain little things which seem nothing to you, and they mean so much to me. I can’t explain; it’s just the brotherly relation which I can’t stand. It’s no use suggesting that we should be as we were before—”
She understood well enough for his purposes.
“I see,” she said.
Michael paused for a moment.
“I think I’ll be going now,” he said. “I am off to Ashbridge in two days. Give Hermann my love, and a jolly Christmas to you both. I’ll let you know when I am back in town.”
She had no reply to this; she saw its justice, and acquiesced.
“Good-bye, then,” said Michael.
He walked home from Chelsea in that utterly blank and unfeeling consciousness which almost invariably is the sequel of any event that brings with it a change of attitude towards life generally. Not for a moment did he tell himself that he had been awakened from a dream, or abandon his conviction that his dream was to be made real. The rare, quiet determination that had made him give up his stereotyped mode of life in the summer and take to music was still completely his, and, if anything, it had been reinforced by Sylvia’s emphatic statement that “she wanted to care.” Only her imagining that their old relations could go on showed him how far she was from knowing what “to care” meant. At first without knowing it, but with a gradually increasing keenness of consciousness, he had become aware that this sisterly attitude of hers towards him had meant so infinitely much, because he had taken it to be the prelude to something more. Now he saw that it was, so to speak, a piece complete in itself. It bore no relation to what he had imagined it would lead into. No curtain went up when the prelude was over; the curtain remained inexorably hanging there, not acknowledging the prelude at all. Not for a moment did he accuse her of encouraging him to have thought so; she had but given him a frankness of comradeship that meant to her exactly what it expressed. But he had thought otherwise; he had imagined that it would grow towards a culmination. All that (and here was the change that made his mind blank and unfeeling) had to be cut away, and with it all the budding branches that his imagination had pictured as springing from it. He could not be comrade to her as he was to her brother—the inexorable demands of sex forbade it.
He went briskly enough through the clean, dry streets. The frost of last night had held throughout the morning, and the sunlight sparkled with a rare and seasonable brightness of a traditional Christmas weather. Hecatombs of turkeys hung in the poulterers’ windows, among sprigs of holly, and shops were bright with children’s toys. The briskness of the day had flushed the colour into the faces of the passengers in the street, and the festive air of the imminent holiday was abroad. All this Michael noticed with a sense of detachment; what had happened had caused a veil to fall between himself and external things; it was as if he was sealed into some glass cage, and had no contact with what passed round him. This lasted throughout his walk, and when he let himself into his flat it was with the same sense of alienation that he found his cousin Francis gracefully reclining on the sofa that he had pulled up in front of the fire.
Francis was inclined to be querulous.
“I was just wondering whether I should give you up,” he said. “The hour that you named for lunch was half-past one. And I have almost forgotten what your clock sounded like when it struck two.”
This also seemed to matter very little.
“Did I ask you to lunch?” he said. “I really quite forgot; I can’t even remember doing it now.”
“But there will be lunch?” asked Francis rather anxiously.
“Of course. It’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
Michael came and stood in front of the fire, and looked with a sudden spasm of envy on the handsome boy who lay there. If he himself had been anything like that