Michael Part 8

"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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sengers 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 c.h.i.n.ks, 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 pa.s.ser-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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.similate, and thank G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, but rather of mockery. To Michael this mood was quite inexplicable, but, characteristically, he looked about in himself for the possible explanation of it.