he had never felt before.
Dimly, as the days went by, he began to conjecture that he who had neverhad a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, ifnot by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of hisreserve, and let himself feel and let himself express. He could see howutterly different was Falbe's general conception and practice oflife from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation ofstrangers--Francis excepted--who moved about, busy with each other andwith affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil,wholly alien to him. He was willing to grant that this alienation, thisabsence of comradeship which he had missed all his life, was of his ownmaking, 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 yettaken his shutters down, so to speak, or thrown his front door open. Hehad peeped out through chinks, and felt how lonely he was, but he hadnot given anyone a chance to get in.
Falbe, on the other hand, lived at his window, ready to hail thepasser-by, even as he had hailed Michael, with cheerful words. Therehe lounged in his shirt-sleeves, you might say, with elbows on thewindow-sill; and not from politeness, but from good fellowship, from thefact 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 capableof liking people, had up till now given them no sign of it. It reallywas not their fault if they had not guessed it.
Two days passed, on the first of which Parsifal was given, and on thesecond Meistersinger. On the third there was no performance, and the twoyoung men had agreed to meet in the morning and drive out of the town toa neighbouring village among the hills, and spend the day there inthe woods. Michael had looked forward to this day with extraordinarypleasure, but there was mingled with it a sort of agony of apprehensionthat Falbe would find him a very boring companion. But the precepts ofAunt Barbara came to his mind, and he reflected that the certain andsure way of proving a bore was to be taken up with the idea that hemight be. And anyhow, Falbe had proposed the plan himself.
They lunched in a little restaurant near a forest-enclosed lake, andsince the day was very hot, did no more than stroll up the hill for ahundred yards, where they would get some hint of breeze, and disposedthemselves at length on the carpet of pine-needles. Through the thickboughs overhead the sunlight reached them only in specks and flakes, thewind was but as a distant sea in the branches, and Falbe rolled overon to his face, and sniffed at the aromatic leaves with the gusto withwhich 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 asmell and put it on your handkerchief; it takes the life out of it. Doyou like smells, Comber?"
"I--I really never thought about it," said Michael.
"Think now, then, and tell me," said Falbe. "If you consider, you knowsuch a lot about me, and, as a matter of fact, I know nothing whateverabout you. I know you like music--I know you like blue trout, becauseyou ate so many of them at lunch to-day. But what else do I know aboutyou? I don't even know what you thought of Parsifal. No, perhaps I'mwrong there, because the fact that you've never mentioned it probablyshows that you couldn't. The symptom of not understanding anything aboutParsifal is to talk about it, and say what a tremendous impression ithas made on you."
"Ah! you've guessed right there," said Michael. "I couldn't talk aboutit; 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 morethan you can talk about your elbows and your knees. It's one of thethings that makes you. . . ."
He turned over on to his back, and laid his hands palm uppermost overhis eyes.
"That's part of the glory of it all," he said; "that art and itsemotions become part of you like the food you eat and the wine youdrink. Art is always making us; it enters into our character anddestiny. As long as you go on growing you assimilate, and thank Godone's mind or soul, or whatever you like to call it, goes on growing fora long time. I suppose the moment comes to most people when they ceaseto grow, when they become fixed and hard; and that is what we mean bybeing old. But till then you weave your destiny, or, rather, people andbeauty weave it for you, as you'll see the Norns weaving, and yet younever know what you are making. You make what you are, and you neverare because you are always becoming. You must excuse me; but Germans arealways 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 tryeverything, just as a puppy tries everything. It tries mutton bones, andmatch-boxes, and soap and boots; it tries to find out what its tail isfor, and bites it till it hurts, on which it draws the conclusion thatit is not meant to eat. Like all metaphysicians, too, and dealers in theabstract, we are intensely practical. Our passion for experimentalismis dictated by the firm object of using the knowledge we acquire. Weare tremendously thorough; we waste nothing, not even time, whereasthe English have an absolute genius for wasting time. Look at all yourgames, your sports, your athletics--I am being quite German now, andforgetting my mother, bless her!--they are merely devices for gettingrid of the hours, and so not having to think. You hate thought asa 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 area nation of children who are always having a perpetual holiday. You gostraying all over the world for fun, and annex it generally, so thatyou can have tiger-shooting in India, and lots of gold to pay for yourtiger-shooting in Africa, and fur from Canada for your coats. Butit's all a game; not one man in a thousand in England has any idea ofEmpire."
"Oh, I think you are wrong there," said Michael. "You believe that onlybecause we don't talk about it. It's--it's like what we agreed aboutParsifal. 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 offoolish, unthinking enjoyment from, and it's from my English blood. Irejoice in my English blood, because you are the happiest people on theface of the earth. But you are happy because you don't think, whereasthe joy of being German is that you do think. England is lying in theshade, like us, with a cigarette and a drink--I wish I had one--and agolf ball or the world with which she has been playing her game. ButGermany is sitting up all night thinking, and every morning she gives anorder 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 hiscigarette.
"It's simply unthinkable!"
"Because you don't think," he interrupted. "I can tell you that thethought of war is never absent for a single day from the average Germanmind. We are all soldiers, you see. We start with that. You start bybeing golfers and cricketers. But 'der Tag' is never quite absentfrom the German mind. I don't say that all you golfers and cricketerswouldn't make good soldiers, but you've got to be made. You can't be agolfer one day and a soldier the next."
Michael laughed.
"As for that," he said, "I made an uncommonly bad soldier. But I am aneven worse golfer. As for cricket--"
Falbe again interrupted.
"Ah, then at last I know two things about you," he said. "You were asoldier and you can't play golf. I have never known so little aboutanybody after three--four days. However, what is our proverb? 'Live andlearn.' But it takes longer to learn than to live. Eh, wha
t nonsense Italk."
He spoke with a sudden irritation, and the laugh at the end of hisspeech was not one of amusement, but rather of mockery. To Michael thismood was quite inexplicable, but, characteristically, he looked about inhimself for the possible explanation of it.
"But what's the matter?" he asked. "Have I annoyed you somehow? I'mawfully sorry."
Falbe did not reply for a moment.
"No, you've not annoyed me," he said. "I've annoyed myself. But that'sthe worst of living on one's nerves, which is the penalty of Baireuth.There is no