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."