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.”