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Michael

by E. F. Benson · English · Gutenberg #2072 · 594,986 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Michael

Author: E. F. Benson


        
Release date: May 14, 2006 [eBook #2072]
                Most recently updated: November 1, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2072

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





MICHAEL

by E. F. Benson




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 

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