not idly, sitting undertrees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths. It was thataspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, wouldnever be able to understand. To Lord Ashbridge's mind, music wasvaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pinkcarnations; he was congenitally incapable of viewing it in any otherlight than a diversion, something that took place between nine andeleven o'clock in the evening, and in smaller quantities at church onSunday morning. He would undoubtedly have said that Handel's Messiah wasthe noblest example of music in the world, because of its subject; musicdid not exist for him as a separate, definite and infinite factor oflife; and since it did not so exist for himself, he could not imagineit existing for anybody else. That Michael correctly knew to be hisfather's general demeanour towards life; he wanted everybody in theirrespective spheres to be like what he was in his. They must take theirpart, as he undoubtedly did, in the Creation-scheme when the Britisharistocracy came into being.
A fresh factor had come into Michael's conception of music during theselast seven days. He had become aware that Germany was music. He hadnaturally known before that the vast proportion of music came fromGermany, that almost all of that which meant "music" to him was ofGerman origin; but that was a very different affair from the convictionnow borne in on his mind that there was not only no music apart fromGermany, but that there was no Germany apart from music.
But every moment he spent in this wayside puddle of a town (for soBaireuth seemed to an unbiased view), he became more and more aware thatmusic beat in the German blood even as sport beat in the blood of hisown people. During this festival week Baireuth existed only because ofthat; at other times Baireuth was probably as non-existent as any dulland minor town in the English Midlands. But, owing to the fact of musicbeing for these weeks resident in Baireuth, the sordid little townletbecame the capital of the huge, patient Empire. It existed just nowsimply for that reason; to-night, with the curtain of the last act ofParsifal, it had ceased to exist again. It was not that a patrioticdesire to honour one of the national heroes in the home where he hadbeen 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 ahundred towns those who were most typically German, whether high orlow, rich or poor, made their joyous pilgrimage. Joy and solemnity,exultation and the yearning that could never be satisfied drew themhere. And even as music was in Michael's heart, so Germany was therealso. They were the people who understood; they did not go to the operaas a be-diamonded interlude between a dinner and a dance; they cameto this dreadful little town, the discomforts of which, the utterprovinciality of which was transformed into the air of the heavenlyJerusalem, as Hermann Falbe had said, because their souls were fed herewith wine and manna. He would find the same thing at Munich, so Falbehad told him, the next week.
The loves and the tragedies of the great titanic forces that sawthe making of the world; the dreams and the deeds of the masters ofNuremberg; above all, sacrifice and enlightenment and redemption of thesoul; how, except by music, could these be made manifest? It was thefirst and only and final alchemy that could by its magic transformationgive an answer to the tremendous riddles of consciousness; that couldlift you, though tearing and making mincemeat of you, to the serenityof the Pisgah-top, whence was seen the promised land. It, in itself, wasreality; and the door-keeper who admitted you into that enchantedrealm was the spirit of Germany. Not France, with its little, morbidshiverings, and its meat-market called love; not Italy, with itsmelodious declamations and tawdry tunes; not Russia even, with the windof its impenetrable winters, its sense of joys snatched from its eternalfrosts gave admittance there; but Germany, "deep, patient Germany," thatsprang from upland hamlets, and flowed down with ever-broadening streaminto the illimitable ocean.
Here, then, were two of the initiations that had come, with theswiftness of the spate in Alpine valleys at the melting of the snow,upon Michael; his own liberty, namely, and this new sense of music. Hehad groped, he felt now, like a blind man in that direction, guided onlyby 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 lessepoch-making had been the dawn of friendship. Throughout the week hisintimacy with Hermann Falbe had developed, shooting up like analoe flower, and rising into sunlight above the mists of his ownself-occupied shyness, which had so darkly beset him all life long. Hehad given the best that he knew of himself to his cousin, but allthe time there had never quite been absent from his mind his senseof inferiority, a sort of aching wonder why he could not be more likeFrancis, more careless, more capable of enjoyment, more of a normaltype. But with Falbe he was able for the first time to forget himselfaltogether; he had met a man who did not recall him to himself, buttook 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 morbidself-consciousness; his anchor had been taken up from its dragging inthe sand, and he rode free, buoyed on waters and taken by tides. Itdid not occur to him to wonder whether Falbe thought him uncouth andawkward; it did not occur to him to try to be pleasant, a job over whichpoor Michael had so often found himself dishearteningly incapable; helet himself be himself in the consciousness that this was sufficient.
They had spent the morning together before this second performance ofParsifal that closed their series, in the woods above the theatre, andMichael, 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, "andsettle 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 dosomething as well as learn something, and, as I told you, I'm going totake up the piano seriously."
Falbe was not attending particularly.
"A fine instrument, the piano," he remarked. "There is certainlysomething to be done with a piano, if you know how to do it. I can struma 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 somethingelse."
"Not really?"
"Really."
"Then it was impolite of you, but you haven't any manners. I was talkingabout my career. I want to do something, and these large hands arereally rather nimble. But I must be taught. The question is whether youwill teach me."
Falbe hesitated.
"I can't tell you," he said, "till I have heard you play. It's likethis: I can't teach you to play unless you know how, and I can't tellif you know how until I have heard you. If you have got that particularsort of temperament that can put itself into the notes out of the endsof your fingers, I can teach you, and I will. But if you haven't, Ishall feel bound to advise you to try the Jew's harp, and see if you canget 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 bringtheir feelings out through their fingers. Others can; it is a specialgift. If you haven't got it, I can't teach you anything, and there isno use in wasting your time and mine. You can teach yourself to befrightfully nimble with your fingers, and all the people who don'tknow will say: 'How divinely Lord Comber plays! That sweet thing; is itBrahms or Mendelssohn?' But I can't really help you towards that; youcan do that for yourself. But if you've got the other, I can and willteach you all that you really know already."
"Go on!" said Michael.
"That's just the devil with the piano," said Falbe. "It's the easiestinstrument of all to make a show on, and it is the rarest sort of personwho can play on it. That's why, all those years, I have hated givinglessons. If one has to, as I have had to, one must take
any awful misswith 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 bemade 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'tthere 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--atleast, whether I think you are capable of playing--whether I can teachyou."
"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 travelsecond-class from engaging a carriage by the day at Baireuth, sincethat clearly was worth while, and they found it waiting for them bythe theatre. There was still time to drive to Falbe's lodging and getthrough this crucial ordeal before the opera, and they went straightthere. 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 toanother chair and waited. Michael sent a despairing glance at thatgay face, suddenly grown grim, and took his seat. He felt a paralysingconviction that Falbe's judgment, whatever that might turn out to be,would be right, and the knowledge turned his fingers stiff. From the fewnotes that Falbe had struck he guessed on what sort of instrument hisordeal was to take place, and yet he knew that Falbe himself would havebeen able to convey to him the sense that he could play, though thepiano was all out of tune, and there might be dumb, disconcerting notesin it. There was justice in Falbe's dictum about the temperament thatlay behind the player, which would assert itself through any faultinessof instrument, and through, so he suspected, any faultiness ofexecution.
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 whichhe had worked a little during the last two months in London. The noteshe knew perfectly; he had believed also that he had found a certainconception of it as a whole, so that he could make something coherentout of it, not merely adding bar to correct bar. And he began the softrepetition of chord-quavers with which it opened.
Then after stumbling wretchedly through two lines of it, he suddenlyforgot himself and Falbe, and the squealing unresponsive notes. He heardthem no more, absorbed in the knowledge of what he meant by them, of themood which they produced in him. His great, ungainly hands had all thegentleness and self-control that strength gives, and the finger-fillingchords were as light and as fine as the settling of some poised bird ona bough. In the last few lines of the prelude a deep bass note had to bestruck at the beginning of each bar; this Michael found was completelydumb, but so clear and vivid was the effect of it in his mind that hescarcely noticed that it returned no answer to his finger. . . . At theend he sat without moving, his hands dropped on to his knees.
Falbe got up and, coming over to the piano, struck the bass notehimself.
"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 surethat it was soundless.
"Yes; I'll teach you," he said. "All the technique you have got, youknow, is wrong from beginning to end, and you mustn't mind unlearningall that. But you've got the thing that matters."
All this stewed and seethed in Michael's mind as he sat that night bythe window looking out on to the silent and empty street. His thoughtsflowed without check or guide from his will, wandering wherever theircourse happened to take them, now lingering, like the water of a riverin some deep, still pool, when he thought of the friendship thathad come into his life, now excitedly plunging down the foam ofswift-flowing rapids in the exhilaration of his newly-found liberty,now proceeding with steady current at the thought of the weeks ofunremitting industry at a beloved task that lay in front of him. Hecould form no definite image out of these which should represent hisordinary day; it was all lost in a bright haze through which its shapewas but faintly discernible; but life lay in front of him with promise,a thing to be embraced and greeted with welcome and eager hands, insteadof 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 itsbeing worth while.
He wondered for a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelingswould have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throatedand voiceless piano, Falbe had said: "I'm sorry, but I can't do anythingwith you." As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a fewpupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view toemerging as a concert-giver the next winter; and as Michael had satdown, he remembered telling himself that there was really not theslightest chance of his friend accepting him as a pupil. He did notintend that this rejection should make the smallest difference to hisaim, but he knew that he would start his work under the tremendoushandicap of Falbe not believing that he had it in him to play, and underthe disappointment of not enjoying the added intimacy which work withand for Falbe would give him. Then he had engaged in this tussle withrefractory 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 themelody meant to him. But at the end, when he came to himself again, andsat with dropped hands waiting for Falbe's verdict, he remembered howhis heart seemed to hang poised until it came. He had rehearsed againto himself his fixed determination that he would play and could play,whatever his friend might think about it; but there was no doubt that hewaited with a greater suspense than he had ever known in his life beforefor that verdict to be made known to him.
Next day came their journey to Munich, and the installation in thebest hotel in Europe. Here Michael was host, and the economy which hepractised when he had only himself to provide for, and which made himgo second-class when travelling, was, as usual, completely abandoned nowthat the pleasure of hospitality was his. He engaged at once the bestdouble suite of rooms that the hotel contained, two bedrooms withbathrooms, and an admirable sitting-room, looking spaciously out onto the square, and with brusque decision silenced Falbe's attemptedremonstrance. "Don't interfere with my show, please," he had said, andproceeded to inquire about a piano to be sent in for the week. Then heturned to his friend again. "Oh, we are going to enjoy ourselves," hesaid, with an irresistible sincerity.
Tristan und Isolde was given on the third day of their stay there, andFalbe, reading the morning German paper, found news.
"The Kaiser has arrived," he said. "There's a truce in the armymanoeuvres for a couple of days, and he has come to be present atTristan 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 severaltimes with my father."
"Has he? But I don't suppose it matters. The visit is awidely-advertised incognito. That's his way. God be with theAll-highest," he added.
"Well, I shan't" said Michael. "But it would shock my father dreadfullyif he knew. The Kaiser looks on him as the type and model of the Englishnobleman."
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 apheasant shoot from eleven till three; then the Emperor had out a steamlaunch and careered up and down the river till six, asking a thousandquestions about the tides and the currents and the navigable channels.Then he lectured us on the family portraits till dinner; after din
nerthere was a concert, at which he conducted the 'Song to Aegir,' and thenthere was a torch-light fandango by the tenants on the lawn. He was onhis holiday, you must remember."
"I heard the 'Song to Aegir' once," remarked Falbe, with a perfectlylevel intonation.
"I was--er--luckier," said Michael politely, "because on that occasion Iheard 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. Thoughthe visit was quite incognito, an enormous military staff which hadbeen poured into the town might have led the thoughtful to suspect theKaiser's presence, even if it had not been announced in the largest typein the papers, and marchings and counter-marchings of troops and suddenbursts of national airs proclaimed the august presence. He held aninformal review of certain Bavarian troops not out for manoeuvres in themorning, visited the sculpture gallery and pinacothek in the afternoon,and when Hermann and Michael went up to the theatre they found rowsof soldiers drawn up, and inside unusual decorations over a section ofstalls which had been removed and was converted into an enormous box.This was in the centre of the first tier, nearly at right angles towhere they sat, in the front row of the same tier; and when, withmilitary punctuality, the procession of uniforms, headed by the Emperor,filed