Michael

E >> E. F. Benson >> Michael


Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either
external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the
splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather
that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarrassments
which that sex had always held for him. She grew in comradeship; he
found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her
charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael
to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same
warm, welcoming kindliness--the same complete absence of pose. You knew
where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the
young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished
that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none
of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly
the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the multitude
which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they
with her, in relationship entirely unsentimental.

But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael's
most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe's principles in
teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school;
he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the
hours.

"What is the good of them?" he asked. "They can only give you nimbleness
and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by
playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or
Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may
choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that
way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written
language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you
precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it
aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the
fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys
its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud
to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that
you don't understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the
words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read
carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like
if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try."

Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.

"There," he said, "begin at the top of the page."

"But I can't," said Michael. "I shall have to spell it out."

"That's just what you mustn't do. Go ahead, and don't pause till you get
to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its
turn, and play as many notes as you can in it."

This was a dismal experience. Michael hitherto had gone on the
painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious
care. Now Falbe's inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in
inextinguishable laughter.

"Go on, go on!" he shouted. "I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly
Strauss's Don Quixote."

Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way
through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe's laughter.

"Oh dear," he said. "Very funny. But don't laugh so at me, Hermann."

Falbe dried his eyes.

"And what was it?" he said. "I declare it was the fourth fugue. An
entirely different conception of it! A thoroughly original view! Now,
what you've got to do, is to repeat that--not the same murder I mean,
but other murders--for a couple of hours a day. . . . By degrees--you
won't believe it--you will find you are not murdering any longer, but
only mortally wounding. After six months I dare say you won't even be
hurting your victims. All the same, you can begin with less muscular
ones."

In this way Michael's musical horizons were infinitely extended. Not
only did this system of Falbe's of flying at new music, and going
recklessly and regardlessly on, give quickness to his brain and finger,
make his wits alert to pick up the new language he was learning, but
it gloriously extended his vision and his range of country. He ran
joyfully, though with a thousand falls and tumbles, through these new
and wonderful vistas; he worshipped at the grave, Gothic sanctuaries of
Beethoven, he roamed through the enchanted garden of Chopin, he felt the
icy and eternal frosts of Russia, and saw in the northern sky the great
auroras spread themselves in spear and sword of fire; he listened to the
wisdom of Brahms, and passed through the noble and smiling country
of Bach. All this, so to speak, was holiday travel, and between his
journeys he applied himself with the same eager industry to the learning
of his art, so that he might reproduce for himself and others true
pictures of the scenes through which he scampered. Here Falbe was not so
easily moved to laughter; he was as severe with Michael as he was with
himself, when it was the question of learning some piece with a view
to really playing it. There was no light-hearted hurrying on through
blurred runs and false notes, slurred phrases and incomplete chords.
Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude
of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed
piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was
played again on Falbe's great Steinway, as a professed performance, a
very different standard was required.

Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.

"This won't do, Michael," he said. "You played it before for me to see
whether you could play. You can. But it won't do to sketch it. Every
note has got to be there; Chopin didn't write them by accident. He knew
quite well what he was about. Begin again, please."

This time Michael got not quite so far, when he was stopped again. He
was playing without notes, and Falbe got up from his chair where he had
the book open, and put it on the piano.

"Do you find difficulty in memorising?" he asked.

This was discouraging; Michael believed that he remembered easily; he
also believed that he had long known this by heart.

"No; I thought I knew it," he said.

"Try again."

This time Falbe stood by him, and suddenly put his finger down into the
middle of Michael's hands, striking a note.

"You left out that F sharp," he said. "Go on. . . . Now you are leaving
out that E natural. Try to get it better by Thursday, and remember this,
that playing, and all that differentiates playing from strumming, only
begins when you can play all the notes that are put down for you to
play without fail. You're beginning at the wrong end; you have admirable
feeling about that prelude, but you needn't think about feeling till
you've got all the notes at your fingers' ends. Then and not till then,
you may begin to remember that you want to be a pianist. Now, what's the
next thing?"

Michael felt somewhat squashed and discouraged. He had thought he had
really worked successfully at the thing he knew so well by sight. His
heavy eyebrows drew together.

"You told me to harmonise that Christmas carol," he remarked, rather
shortly.

Falbe put his hand on his shoulder.

"Look here, Michael," he said, "you're vexed with me. Now, there's
nothing to be vexed at. You know quite well you were leaving out lots of
notes from those jolly fat chords, and that you weren't playing cleanly.
Now I'm taking you seriously, and I won't have from you anything but
the best you can do. You're not doing your best when you don't even play
what is written. You can't begin to work at this till you do that."

Michael had a moment's severe tussle with his temper. He felt vexed and
disappointed that Hermann should have sent him back like a schoolboy
with his exercise torn over. Not immediately did he confess to himself
that he was completely in the wrong.

"I'm doing the best I can," he said. "It's rather discouraging."

He moved his big shoulders slightly, as if to indicate that Hermann's
hand was not wanted there. Hermann kept it there.

"It might be discouraging," he said, "if you were doing your best."

Michael's ill-temper oozed from him.

"I'm wrong," he said, turning round with the smile that made his ugly
face so pleasant. "And I'm sorry both that I have been slack and that
I've been sulky. Will that do?"

Falbe laughed.

"Very well indeed," he said. "Now for 'Good King Wenceslas.' Wasn't
it--"

"Yes; I got awfully interested over it, Hermann. I thought I would try
and work it up into a few variations."

"Let's hear," said Falbe.

This was a vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and
a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple
little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the
half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature
handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen
presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure;
it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of
itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid
octaves, and finally asserted itself, heard once more, over a great
scale base of bells.

Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but
receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done
over Michael's fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up
with a certain excitement.

"Do you know what you've done?" he said. "You've done something that's
really good. Faults? Yes, millions; but there's a first-rate imagination
at the bottom of it. How did it happen?"

Michael flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, they sang themselves," he said, "and I learned them. But will it
really do? Is there anything in it?"

"Yes, old boy, there's King Wenceslas in it, and you've dressed him up
well. Play that last one again."

The last one was taxing to the fingers, but Michael's big hands banged
out the octave scale in the bass with wonderful ease, and Falbe gave a
great guffaw of pleasure at the rollicking conclusion.

"Write them all down," he said, "and try if you can hear it singing half
a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to
play the lot at my concert in January."

Michael gasped.

"You don't mean that?" he said.

"Certainly I do. It's a fine bit of stuff."

It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that
Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits
of the air--whatever those melodious sprites may be--had for the last
month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further
variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now,
as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing;
their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed
himself, and they haunted him no longer. At present he had but jotted
down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it
gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of
his own brain, setting Falbe his task.

But he felt much more than this. He had done something. Michael, the
dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of
music. All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate,
unable, so it had seemed to him, to show himself, to let himself out.
And not till now, when he had found this means of access, did he know
how passionately he had desired it, nor how immensely, in the process
of so doing, his desire had grown. He must find out more ways, other
channels of projecting himself. The need for that, as of a diver
throwing himself into the empty air and the laughing waters below him,
suddenly took hold of him.

He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages,
and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it:

VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.

By

Michael Comber.

He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.

"Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe," he wrote at the top.


CHAPTER VII


Michael had been so engrossingly employed since his return to London in
the autumn that the existence of other ties and other people apart from
those immediately connected with his work had worn a very shadow-like
aspect. He had, it is true, written with some regularity to his mother,
finding, somewhat to his dismay, how very slight the common ground
between them was for purposes of correspondence. He could outline the
facts that he had been to several concerts, that he had seen much of
his music-master, that he had been diligent at his work, but he realised
that there was nothing in detail about those things that could possibly
interest her, and that nothing except them really interested him. She
on her side had little to say except to record the welfare of Petsy, to
remark on the beauty of October, and tell him how many shooting parties
they had had.

His correspondence with his father had been less frequent, and
absolutely one-sided, since Lord Ashbridge took no notice at all of his
letters. Michael regretted this, as showing that he was still outcast,
but it cannot be said to have come between him and the sunshine, for he
had begun to manufacture the sunshine within, that internal happiness
which his environment and way of life produced, which seemed to be
independent of all that was not directly connected with it. But a letter
which he received next morning from his mother stated, in addition to
the fact that Petsy had another of her tiresome bilious attacks (poor
lamb), that his father and she thought it right that he should come down
to Ashbridge for Christmas. It conveyed the sense that at this joyful
season a truce, probably limited in duration, and, even while it lasted,
of the nature of a strongly-armed neutrality, was proclaimed, but the
prospect was not wholly encouraging, for Lady Ashbridge added that
she hoped Michael would not "go on" vexing his father. What precisely
Michael was expected to do in order to fulfil that wish was not further
stated, but he wrote dutifully enough to say that he would come down at
Christmas.

But the letter rekindled his dormant sense of there being other people
in the world beside his immediate circle; also, indefinably, it gave
him the sense that his mother wanted him. That should be so then, and
sequentially he remembered with a pang of self-reproach that he had not
as much as indicated his presence in London to Aunt Barbara, or set eyes
on her since their meeting in August. He knew she was in London, since
he had seen her name in some paragraph in the papers not long before,
and instantly wrote to ask her to dine with him at a near date. Her
answer was characteristic.

"Of course I'll dine with you, my dear," she wrote; "it will be
delightful. And what has happened to you? Your letter actually conveyed
a sense of cordiality. You never used to be cordial. And I wish to meet
some of your nice friends. Ask one or two, please--a prima donna of some
kind and a pianist, I think. I want them weird and original--the prima
donna with short hair, and the pianist with long. In Tony's new station
in life I never see anybody except the sort of people whom your father
likes. Are you forgiven yet, by the way?"

Michael found himself on the grin at the thought of Aunt Barbara
suddenly encountering the two magnificent Falbes (prima donna and
pianist exactly as she had desired) as representing the weird sort of
people whom she pictured his living among, and the result quite came
up to his expectations. As usual, Aunt Barbara was late, and came in
talking rapidly about the various causes that had detained her, which
her fruitful imagination had suggested to her as she dressed. In order,
perhaps, to suit herself to the circle in which she would pass the
evening, she had put on (or, rather, it looked as if her maid had thrown
at her) a very awful sort of tea-gown, brown and prickly-looking, and
adapted to Bohemian circles. She, with the same lively imagination, had
pictured Michael in a velveteen coat and soft shirt, the pianist as very
small, with spectacles and long hair, and the prima donna a full-blown
kind of barmaid with Roman pearls. . . .

"Yes, my dear, I know I am late," she began before she was inside the
door, "but Og had so much to say, and there was a block at Hyde Park
Corner. My dear Michael, how smart you look!"

She came round the corner of the screen and the Falbes burst upon her,
Hermann and Sylvia standing by the fire. For the short, spectacled
pianist there was this very tall, English-looking young man, upright and
soldierly, with his handsome, boyish face and well-fitting clothes. That
was bad enough, but infinitely worse was she who was to have been the
full-blown barmaid. Instead was this magnificent girl, nearly as tall as
her brother, with her small oval face crowning the column of her neck,
her eyes merry, her mouth laughing at some brotherly retort that Hermann
had just made. Aunt Barbara took her in with one second's survey--her
face, her neck, her beautiful dress, her whole air of ease and
good-breeding, and gave a despairing glance at her own prickly tea-gown.
For the moment, amiably accustomed as she was to laugh at herself, she
did not find it humourous.

"Miss Sylvia Falbe, Aunt Barbara," said Michael with a little tremor
in his voice; "and Mr. Hermann Falbe, Lady Barbara Jerome," he added,
rather as if he expected nobody to believe it.

Aunt Barbara made the best of it: shook hands in her jolly manner, and
burst into laughter.

"Michael, I could slay you," she said; "but before I do that I must tell
your friends all about it. This horrible nephew of mine, Miss Falbe,
promised me two weird musicians, and I expected--I really can't tell you
what I expected--but there were to be spectacles and velveteen coats and
the general air of an afternoon concert at Clapham Junction. But it is
nice to be made such a fool of. I feel precisely like an elderly and
sour governess who has been ordered to come down to dinner so that
there shan't be thirteen. Give me your arm, Mr. Falbe, and take me in
to dinner at once, where I may drown my embarrassment in soup. Or does
Michael go in first? Go on, wretch!"

Presently they were seated at dinner, and Aunt Barbara could not help
enlarging a little on her own discomfiture.

"It is all your fault, Michael," she said. "You have been in London all
these weeks without letting me know anything about you or your friends,
or what you were doing; so naturally I supposed you were leading some
obscure kind of existence. Instead of which I find this sort of thing.
My dear, what good soup! I shall see if I can't induce your cook to
leave you. But bachelors always have the best of everything. Now tell
me about your visit to Germany. Which was the point where we
parted--Baireuth, wasn't it? I would not go to Baireuth with anybody!"

"I went with Mr. Falbe," said Michael.

"Ah, Mr. Falbe has not asked me yet. I may have to revise what I say,"
said Aunt Barbara daringly.

"I didn't ask Michael," said Hermann. "I got into his carriage as the
train was moving; and my luggage was left behind."

"I was left behind," said Sylvia, "which was worse. But I sent Hermann's
luggage."

"So expeditiously that it arrived the day before we left for Munich,"
remarked Hermann.

"And that's all the gratitude I get. But in the interval you lived upon
Lord Comber."

"I do still in the money I earn by giving him music lessons. Mike, have
you finished the Variations yet?"

"Variations--what are Variations?" asked Aunt Barbara.

"Yes, two days ago. Variations are all the things you think about on the
piano, Aunt Barbara, when you are playing a tune made by somebody else."

"Should I like them? Will Mr. Falbe play them to me?" asked she.

"I daresay he will if he can. But I thought you loathed music."

"It certainly depends on who makes it," said Aunt Barbara. "I don't like
ordinary music, because the person who made it doesn't matter to me.
But if, so to speak, it sounds like somebody I know, it is a different
matter."

Michael turned to Sylvia.

"I want to ask your leave for something I have already done," he said.

"And if I don't give it you?"

"Then I shan't tell you what it is."

Sylvia looked at him with her candid friendly eyes. Her brother always
told her that she never looked at anybody except her friends; if she was
engaged in conversation with a man she did not like, she looked at his
shirt-stud or at a point slightly above his head.

"Then, of course, I give in," she said. "I must give you leave if
otherwise I shan't know what you have done. But it's a mean trick. Tell
me at once."

"I've dedicated the Variations to you," he said.

Sylvia flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, but that's absolutely darling of you," she said. "Have you, really?
Do you mean it?"

"If you'll allow me."

"Allow you? Hermann, the Variations are mine. Isn't it too lovely?"

It was at this moment that Aunt Barbara happened to glance at Michael,
and it suddenly struck her that it was a perfectly new Michael whom she
looked at. She knew and was secretly amused at the fiasco that always
attended the introduction of amiable young ladies to Ashbridge, and had
warned her sister-in-law that Michael, when he chose the girl he wanted,
would certainly do it on his own initiative. Now she felt sure that
Michael, though he might not be aware of it himself, was, even if he had
not chosen, beginning to choose. There was that in his eyes which
none of the importations to Ashbridge had ever seen there, that eager
deferential attention, which shows that a young man is interested
because it is a girl he is talking to. That, she knew, had never been
characteristic of Michael; indeed, it would not have been far from the
truth to say that the fact that he was talking to a girl was sufficient
to make his countenance wear an expression of polite boredom. Then for a
while, as dinner progressed, she doubted the validity of her conclusion,
for the Michael who was entertaining her to-night was wholly different
from the Michael she had known and liked and pitied. She felt that she
did not know this new one yet, but she was certain that she liked him,
and equally sure that she did not pity him at all. He had found his
place, he had found his work; he evidently fitted into his life, which,
after all, is the surest ground of happiness, and it might be that it
was only general joy, so to speak, that kindled that pleasant fire in
his face. And then once more she went back to her first conclusion, for
talking to Michael herself she saw, as a woman so infallibly sees, that
he gave her but the most superficial attention--sufficient, indeed, to
allow him to answer intelligently and laugh at the proper places, but
his mind was not in the least occupied with her. If Sylvia moved his
glance flickered across in her direction: it was she who gave him his
alertness. Aunt Barbara felt that she could have told him truthfully
that he was in love with her, and she rather thought that it would be
news to him; probably he did not know it yet himself. And she wondered
what his father would say when he knew it.

"And then Munich," she said, violently recalling Michael's attention
towards her. "Munich I could have borne better than Baireuth, and when
Mr. Falbe asks me there I shall probably go. Your Uncle Tony was in
Germany then, by the way; he went over at the invitation of the Emperor
to the manoeuvres."

"Did he? The Emperor came to Munich for a day during them. He was at the
opera," said Michael.

"You didn't speak to him, I suppose?" she asked.

"Yes; he sent for me, and talked a lot. In fact, he talked too much,
because I didn't hear a note of the second act."

Aunt Barbara became infinitely more interested.

"Tell me all about it, Michael," she said. "What did he talk about?"

"Everything, as far as I can remember, England, Ashbridge, armies,
navies, music. Hermann says he cast pearls before swine--"

"And his tone, his attitude?" she asked.

"Towards us?--towards England? Immensely friendly, and most inquisitive.
I was never asked so many questions in so short a time."

Aunt Barbara suddenly turned to Falbe.

"And you?" she asked. "Were you with Michael?"

"No, Lady Barbara. I had no pearls."

"And are you naturalised English?" she asked.

"No; I am German."

She slid swiftly off the topic.

"Do you wonder I ask, with your talking English so perfectly?" she said.
"You should hear me talking French when we are entertaining Ambassadors
and that sort of persons. I talk it so fast that nobody can understand a
word I say. That is a defensive measure, you must observe, because even
if I talked it quite slowly they would understand just as little. But
they think it is the pace that stupefies them, and they leave me in a
curious, dazed condition. And now Miss Falbe and I are going to leave
you two. Be rather a long time, dear Michael, so that Mr. Falbe can tell
you what he thinks of me, and his sister shall tell me what she thinks
of you. Afterwards you and I will tell each other, if it is not too
fearful."