Hermann Falbe had just gone back to his lodgings at the end of the
Richard Wagner Strasse late on the night of their last day at Baireuth,
and Michael, who had leaned out of his window to remind him of the hour
of their train’s departure the next morning, turned back into the room
to begin his packing. That was not an affair that would take much time,
but since, on this sweltering August night, it would certainly be a
process that involved the production of much heat, he made ready for bed
first, and went about his preparations in pyjamas. The work of dropping
things into a bag was soon over, and finding it impossible to entertain
the idea of sleep, he drew one of the stiff, plush-covered arm-chairs to
the window and slipped the rein from his thoughts, letting them gallop
where they pleased.
In all his life he had never experienced so much sheer emotion as the
last week had held for him. He had enjoyed his first taste of liberty;
he had stripped himself naked to music; he had found a friend. Any one
of these would have been sufficient to saturate him, and they had all,
in the decrees of Fate, come together. His life hitherto had been like
some dry sponge, dusty and crackling; now it was plunged in the waters
of three seas, all incomparably sweet.
He had gained his liberty, and in that process he had forgotten about
himself, the self which up till now had been so intolerable a burden. At
school, and even before, when first the age of self-consciousness dawned
upon him, he had seen himself as he believed others saw him--a queer,
awkward, ill-made boy, slow at his work, shy with his fellows, incapable
at games. Walled up in this fortress of himself, this gloomy and
forbidding fastness, he had altogether failed to find the means of
access to others, both to the normal English boys among whom his path
lay, and also to his teachers, who, not unnaturally, found him sullen
and unresponsive. There was no key among the rather limited bunches at
their command which unlocked him, nor at home had anything been found
which could fit his wards. It had been the business of school to turn
out boys of certain received types. There was the clever boy, the
athletic boy, the merely pleasant boy; these and the combinations
arrived at from these types were the output. There was no use for
others.
Then had succeeded those three nightmare years in the Guards, where,
with his more mature power of observation, he had become more actively
conscious of his inability to take his place on any of the recognised
platforms. And all the time, like an owl on his solitary perch, he had
gazed out lonelily, while the other birds of day, too polite to mock
him, had merely passed him by. One such, it is true--his cousin--had sat
by him, and the poor owl’s heart had gone out to him. But even Francis,
so he saw now, had not understood. He had but accepted the fact of him
without repugnance, had been fond of him as a queer sort of kind elder
cousin.
Then there was Aunt Barbara. Aunt Barbara, Michael allowed, had
understood a good deal; she had pointed out with her unerringly
humourous finger the obstacles he had made for himself.
But could Aunt Barbara understand the rapture of living which this
one week of liberty had given him? That Michael doubted. She had only
pointed out the disabilities he made for himself. She did not know
what he was capable of in the way of happiness. But he thought, though
without self-consciousness, how delightful it would be to show himself,
the new, unshelled self, to Aunt Barbara again.
A laughing couple went tapping down the street below his window, boy and
girl, with arms and waists interlaced. They were laughing at nothing at
all, except that they were boy and girl together and it was all glorious
fun. But the sight of them gave Michael a sudden spasm of envy. With all
this enlightenment that had come to him during this last week, there had
come no gleam of what that simplest and commonest aspect of human nature
meant. He had never felt towards a girl what that round-faced German
boy felt. He was not sure, but he thought he disliked girls; they meant
nothing to him, anyhow, and the mere thought of his arm round a girl’s
waist only suggested a very embarrassing attitude. He had nothing to
say to them, and the knowledge of his inability filled him with
an uncomfortable sense of his want of normality, just as did the
consciousness of his long arms and stumpy legs.
There was a night he remembered when Francis had insisted that he should
go with him to a discreet little supper party after an evening at
the music-hall. There were just four of them--he, Francis, and two
companions--and he played the role of sour gooseberry to his cousin,
who, with the utmost gaiety, had proved himself completely equal to the
inauspicious occasion, and had drank indiscriminately out of both the
girls’ glasses, and lit cigarettes for them; and, after seeing them both
home, had looked in on Michael, and gone into fits of laughter at his
general incompatibility.
The steps and conversation passed round the corner, and Michael,
stretching his bare toes on to the cool balcony, resumed his
researches--those joyful, unegoistic researches into himself. His
liberty was bound up with his music; the first gave the key to the
second. Often as he had rested, so to speak, in oases of music in
London, they were but a pause from the desert of his uncongenial life
into the desert again. But now the desert was vanished, and the oasis
stretched illimitable to the horizon in front of him. That was where,
for the future, his life was to be passed, not idly, sitting under
trees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths. It was that
aspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, would
never be able to understand. To Lord Ashbridge’s mind, music was
vaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pink
carnations; he was congenitally incapable of viewing it in any other
light than a diversion, something that took place between nine and
eleven o’clock in the evening, and in smaller quantities at church on
Sunday morning. He would undoubtedly have said that Handel’s Messiah was
the noblest example of music in the world, because of its subject; music
did not exist for him as a separate, definite and infinite factor of
life; and since it did not so exist for himself, he could not imagine
it existing for anybody else. That Michael correctly knew to be his
father’s general demeanour towards life; he wanted everybody in their
respective spheres to be like what he was in his. They must take their
part, as he undoubtedly did, in the Creation-scheme when the British
aristocracy came into being.
A fresh factor had come into Michael’s conception of music during these
last seven days. He had become aware that Germany was music. He had
naturally known before that the vast proportion of music came from
Germany, that almost all of that which meant “music” to him was of
German origin; but that was a very different affair from the conviction
now borne in on his mind that there was not only no music apart from
Germany, but that there was no Germany apart from music.
But every moment he spent in this wayside puddle of a town (for so
Baireuth seemed to an unbiased view), he became more and more aware that
music beat in the German blood even as sport beat in the blood of his
own people. During this festival week Baireuth existed only because of
that; at other times Baireuth was probably as non-existent as any dull
and minor town in the English Midlands. But, owing to the fact of music
being for these weeks resident in Baireuth, the sordid little townlet
became the capital of the huge, patient Empire. It existed just now
simply for that reason; to-night, with the curtain of the last act of
Parsifal, it had ceased to exist again. It was not that a patriotic
desire to honour one of the national heroes in the home where he had
been 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 a
hundred towns those who were most typically German, whether high or
low, rich or poor, made their joyous pilgrimage. Joy and solemnity,
exultation and the yearning that could never be satisfied drew them
here. And even as music was in Michael’s heart, so Germany was there
also. They were the people who understood; they did not go to the opera
as a be-diamonded interlude between a dinner and a dance; they came
to this dreadful little town, the discomforts of which, the utter
provinciality of which was transformed into the air of the heavenly
Jerusalem, as Hermann Falbe had said, because their souls were fed here
with wine and manna. He would find the same thing at Munich, so Falbe
had told him, the next week.
The loves and the tragedies of the great titanic forces that saw
the making of the world; the dreams and the deeds of the masters of
Nuremberg; above all, sacrifice and enlightenment and redemption of the
soul; how, except by music, could these be made manifest? It was the
first and only and final alchemy that could by its magic transformation
give an answer to the tremendous riddles of consciousness; that could
lift you, though tearing and making mincemeat of you, to the serenity
of the Pisgah-top, whence was seen the promised land. It, in itself, was
reality; and the door-keeper who admitted you into that enchanted
realm was the spirit of Germany. Not France, with its little, morbid
shiverings, and its meat-market called love; not Italy, with its
melodious declamations and tawdry tunes; not Russia even, with the wind
of its impenetrable winters, its sense of joys snatched from its eternal
frosts gave admittance there; but Germany, “deep, patient Germany,” that
sprang from upland hamlets, and flowed down with ever-broadening stream
into the illimitable ocean.
Here, then, were two of the initiations that had come, with the
swiftness of the spate in Alpine valleys at the melting of the snow,
upon Michael; his own liberty, namely, and this new sense of music. He
had groped, he felt now, like a blind man in that direction, guided only
by 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 less
epoch-making had been the dawn of friendship. Throughout the week his
intimacy with Hermann Falbe had developed, shooting up like an
aloe flower, and rising into sunlight above the mists of his own
self-occupied shyness, which had so darkly beset him all life long. He
had given the best that he knew of himself to his cousin, but all
the time there had never quite been absent from his mind his sense
of inferiority, a sort of aching wonder why he could not be more like
Francis, more careless, more capable of enjoyment, more of a normal
type. But with Falbe he was able for the first time to forget himself
altogether; he had met a man who did not recall him to himself, but
took 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 morbid
self-consciousness; his anchor had been taken up from its dragging in
the sand, and he rode free, buoyed on waters and taken by tides. It
did not occur to him to wonder whether Falbe thought him uncouth and
awkward; it did not occur to him to try to be pleasant, a job over which
poor Michael had so often found himself dishearteningly incapable; he
let himself be himself in the consciousness that this was sufficient.
They had spent the morning together before this second performance of
Parsifal that closed their series, in the woods above the theatre, and
Michael, 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, “and
settle 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 do
something as well as learn something, and, as I told you, I’m going to
take up the piano seriously.”
Falbe was not attending particularly.
“A fine instrument, the piano,” he remarked. “There is certainly
something to be done with a piano, if you know how to do it. I can strum
a 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 something
else.”
“Not really?”
“Really.”
“Then it was impolite of you, but you haven’t any manners. I was talking
about my career. I want to do something, and these large hands are
really rather nimble. But I must be taught. The question is whether you
will teach me.”
Falbe hesitated.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, “till I have heard you play. It’s like
this: I can’t teach you to play unless you know how, and I can’t tell
if you know how until I have heard you. If you have got that particular
sort of temperament that can put itself into the notes out of the ends
of your fingers, I can teach you, and I will. But if you haven’t, I
shall feel bound to advise you to try the Jew’s harp, and see if you can
get 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 bring
their feelings out through their fingers. Others can; it is a special
gift. If you haven’t got it, I can’t teach you anything, and there is
no use in wasting your time and mine. You can teach yourself to be
frightfully nimble with your fingers, and all the people who don’t
know will say: ‘How divinely Lord Comber plays! That sweet thing; is it
Brahms or Mendelssohn?’ But I can’t really help you towards that; you
can do that for yourself. But if you’ve got the other, I can and will
teach you all that you really know already.”
“Go on!” said Michael.
“That’s just the devil with the piano,” said Falbe. “It’s the easiest
instrument of all to make a show on, and it is the rarest sort of person
who can play on it. That’s why, all those years, I have hated giving
lessons. If one has to, as I have had to, one must take any awful miss
with 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 be
made 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’t
there 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--at
least, whether I think you are capable of playing--whether I can teach
you.”
“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 travel
second-class from engaging a carriage by the day at Baireuth, since
that clearly was worth while, and they found it waiting for them by
the theatre. There was still time to drive to Falbe’s lodging and get
through this crucial ordeal before the opera, and they went straight
there. 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 to
another chair and waited. Michael sent a despairing glance at that
gay face, suddenly grown grim, and took his seat. He felt a paralysing
conviction that Falbe’s judgment, whatever that might turn out to be,
would be right, and the knowledge turned his fingers stiff. From the few
notes that Falbe had struck he guessed on what sort of instrument his
ordeal was to take place, and yet he knew that Falbe himself would have
been able to convey to him the sense that he could play, though the
piano was all out of tune, and there might be dumb, disconcerting notes
in it. There was justice in Falbe’s dictum about the temperament that
lay behind the player, which would assert itself through any faultiness
of instrument, and through, so he suspected, any faultiness of
execution.
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 which
he had worked a little during the last two months in London. The notes
he knew perfectly; he had believed also that he had found a certain
conception of it as a whole, so that he could make something coherent
out of it, not merely adding bar to correct bar. And he began the soft
repetition of chord-quavers with which it opened.
Then after stumbling wretchedly through two lines of it, he suddenly
forgot himself and Falbe, and the squealing unresponsive notes. He heard
them no more, absorbed in the knowledge of what he meant by them, of the
mood which they produced in him. His great, ungainly hands had all the
gentleness and self-control that strength gives, and the finger-filling
chords were as light and as fine as the settling of some poised bird on
a bough. In the last few lines of the prelude a deep bass note had to be
struck at the beginning of each bar; this Michael found was completely
dumb, but so clear and vivid was the effect of it in his mind that he
scarcely noticed that it returned no answer to his finger. . . . At the
end he sat without moving, his hands dropped on to his knees.
Falbe got up and, coming over to the piano, struck the bass note
himself.
“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 sure
that it was soundless.
“Yes; I’ll teach you,” he said. “All the technique you have got, you
know, is wrong from beginning to end, and you mustn’t mind unlearning
all that. But you’ve got the thing that matters.”
All this stewed and seethed in Michael’s mind as he sat that night by
the window looking out on to the silent and empty street. His thoughts
flowed without check or guide from his will, wandering wherever their
course happened to take them, now lingering, like the water of a river
in some deep, still pool, when he thought of the friendship that
had come into his life, now excitedly plunging down the foam of
swift-flowing rapids in the exhilaration of his newly-found liberty,
now proceeding with steady current at the thought of the weeks of
unremitting industry at a beloved task that lay in front of him. He
could form no definite image out of these which should represent his
ordinary day; it was all lost in a bright haze through which its shape
was but faintly discernible; but life lay in front of him with promise,
a thing to be embraced and greeted with welcome and eager hands, instead
of 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 its
being worth while.
He wondered for a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelings
would have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throated
and voiceless piano, Falbe had said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything
with you.” As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a few
pupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view to
emerging as a concert-giver the next winter; and as Michael had sat
down, he remembered telling himself that there was really not the
slightest chance of his friend accepting him as a pupil. He did not
intend that this rejection should make the smallest difference to his
aim, but he knew that he would start his work under the tremendous
handicap of Falbe not believing that he had it in him to play, and under
the disappointment of not enjoying the added intimacy which work with
and for Falbe would give him. Then he had engaged in this tussle with
refractory 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 the
melody meant to him. But at the end, when he came to himself again, and
sat with dropped hands waiting for Falbe’s verdict, he remembered how
his heart seemed to hang poised until it came. He had rehearsed again
to himself his fixed determination that he would play and could play,
whatever his friend might think about it; but there was no doubt that he
waited with a greater suspense than he had ever known in his life before
for that verdict to be made known to him.
Next day came their journey to Munich, and the installation in the
best hotel in Europe. Here Michael was host, and the economy which he
practised when he had only himself to provide for, and which made him
go second-class when travelling, was, as usual, completely abandoned now
that the pleasure of hospitality was his. He engaged at once the best
double suite of rooms that the hotel contained, two bedrooms with
bathrooms, and an admirable sitting-room, looking spaciously out on
to the square, and with brusque decision silenced Falbe’s attempted
remonstrance. “Don’t interfere with my show, please,” he had said, and
proceeded to inquire about a piano to be sent in for the week. Then he
turned to his friend again. “Oh, we are going to enjoy ourselves,” he
said, with an irresistible sincerity.
Tristan und Isolde was given on the third day of their stay there, and
Falbe, reading the morning German paper, found news.
“The Kaiser has arrived,” he said. “There’s a truce in the army
manoeuvres for a couple of days, and he has come to be present at
Tristan 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 several
times with my father.”
“Has he? But I don’t suppose it matters. The visit is a
widely-advertised incognito. That’s his way. God be with the
All-highest,” he added.
“Well, I shan’t” said Michael. “But it would shock my father dreadfully
if he knew. The Kaiser looks on him as the type and model of the English
nobleman.”
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 a
pheasant shoot from eleven till three; then the Emperor had out a steam
launch and careered up and down the river till six, asking a thousand
questions about the tides and the currents and the navigable channels.
Then he lectured us on the family portraits till dinner; after dinner
there was a concert, at which he conducted the ‘Song to Aegir,’ and then
there was a torch-light fandango by the tenants on the lawn. He was on
his holiday, you must remember.”
“I heard the ‘Song to Aegir’ once,” remarked Falbe, with a perfectly
level intonation.
“I was--er--luckier,” said Michael politely, “because on that occasion I
heard 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. Though
the visit was quite incognito, an enormous military staff which had
been poured into the town might have led the thoughtful to suspect the
Kaiser’s presence, even if it had not been announced in the largest type
in the papers, and marchings and counter-marchings of troops and sudden
bursts of national airs proclaimed the august presence. He held an
informal review of certain Bavarian troops not out for manoeuvres in the
morning, visited the sculpture gallery and pinacothek in the afternoon,
and when Hermann and Michael went up to the theatre they found rows
of soldiers drawn up, and inside unusual decorations over a section of
stalls which had been removed and was converted into an enormous box.
This was in the centre of the first tier, nearly at right angles to
where they sat, in the front row of the same tier; and when, with
military punctuality, the procession of uniforms, headed by the Emperor,
filed in, the whole of the crowded house stood up and broke into a roar
of recognition and loyalty.
For a minute, or perhaps more, the Emperor stood facing the house with
his hand raised in salute, a figure the uprightness of which made him
look tall. His brilliant uniform was ablaze with decorations; he seemed
every inch a soldier and a leader of men. For that minute he stood
looking neither to the right nor left, stern and almost frowning, with
no shadow of a smile playing on the tightly-drawn lips, above which his
moustache was brushed upwards in two stiff protuberances towards his
eyes. He was there just then not to see, but to be seen, his incognito
was momentarily in abeyance, and he stood forth the supreme head of his
people, the All-highest War Lord, who had come that day from the
field, to which he would return across half Germany tomorrow. It was an
impressive and dignified moment, and Michael heard Falbe say to himself:
“Kaiserlich! Kaiserlich!”
Then it was over. The Emperor sat down, beckoned to two of his officers,
who had stood in a group far at the back of the box, to join him, and
with one on each side he looked about the house and chatted to them. He
had taken out his opera-glass, which he adjusted, using his right hand
only, and looked this way and that, as if, incognito again, he was
looking for friends in the house. Once Michael thought that he looked
rather long and fixedly in his direction, and then, putting down his
glass, he said something to one of the officers, this time clearly
pointing towards Michael. Then he gave some signal, just raising his
hand towards the orchestra, and immediately the lights were put down,
the whole house plunged in darkness, except where the lamps in the sunk
orchestra faintly illuminated the base of the curtain, and the first
longing, unsatisfied notes of the prelude began.
The next hour passed for Michael in one unbroken mood of absorption. The
supreme moment of knowing the music intimately and of never having seen
the opera before was his, and all that he had dreamed of or imagined
as to the possibilities of music was flooded and drowned in the thing
itself. You could not say that it was more gigantic than The Ring, more
human than the Meistersingers, more emotional than Parsifal, but it
was utterly and wholly different to anything else he had ever seen or
conjectured. Falbe, he himself, the thronged and silent theatre, the
Emperor, Munich, Germany, were all blotted out of his consciousness.
He just watched, as if discarnate, the unrolling of the decrees of Fate
which were to bring so simple and overpowering a tragedy on the two who
drained the love-potion together. And at the end he fell back in his
seat, feeling thrilled and tired, exhilarated and exhausted.
“Oh, Hermann,” he said, “what years I’ve wasted!”
Falbe laughed.
“You’ve wasted more than you know yet,” he said. “Hallo!”
A very resplendent officer had come clanking down the gangway next them.
He put his heels together and bowed.
“Lord Comber, I think?” he said in excellent English.
Michael roused himself.
“Yes?” he said.
“His Imperial Majesty has done me the honour to desire you to come and
speak to him,” he said.
“Now?” said Michael.
“If you will be so good,” and he stood aside for Michael to pass up the
stairs in front of him.
In the wide corridor behind he joined him again.
“Allow me to introduce myself as Count von Bergmann,” he said, “and
one of His Majesty’s aides-de-camp. The Kaiser always speaks with
great pleasure of the visits he has paid to your father, and he saw you
immediately he came into the theatre. If you will permit me, I would
advise you to bow, but not very low, respecting His Majesty’s incognito,
to seat yourself as soon as he desires it, and to remain till he gives
you some speech of dismissal. Forgive me for going in front of you here.
I have to introduce you to His Majesty’s presence.”
Michael followed him down the steps to the front of the box.
“Lord Comber, All-highest,” he said, and instantly stood back.
The Emperor rose and held out his hand, and Michael, bowing over it as
he took it, felt himself seized in the famous grip of steel, of which
its owner as well as its recipient was so conscious.
“I am much pleased to see you, Lord Comber,” said he. “I could not
resist the pleasure of a little chat with you about our beloved England.
And your excellent father, how is he?”
He indicated a chair to Michael, who, as advised, instantly took it,
though the Emperor remained a moment longer standing.
“I left him in very good health, Your Majesty,” said Michael.
“Ah! I am glad to hear it. I desire you to convey to him my friendliest
greetings, and to your mother also. I well remember my last visit to
his house above the tidal estuary at Ashbridge, and I hope it may not be
very long before I have the opportunity to be in England again.”
He spoke in a voice that seemed rather hoarse and tired, but his manner
expressed the most courteous cordiality. His face, which had been as
still as a statue’s when he showed himself to the house, was now never
in repose for a moment. He kept turning his head, which he carried very
upright, this way and that as he spoke; now he would catch sight of
someone in the audience to whom he directed his glance, now he would
peer over the edge of the low balustrade, now look at the group of
officers who stood apart at the back of the box.
His whole demeanour suggested a nervous, highly-strung condition; the
restlessness of it was that of a man overstrained, who had lost the
capability of being tranquil. Now he frowned, now he smiled, but never
for a moment was he quiet. Then he launched a perfect hailstorm of
questions at Michael, to the answers to which (there was scarcely time
for more than a monosyllable in reply) he listened with an eager and
a suspicious attention. They were concerned at first with all sorts of
subjects: inquired if Michael had been at Baireuth, what he was going to
do after the Munich festival was over, if he had English friends
here. He inquired Falbe’s name, looked at him for a moment through his
glasses, and desired to know more about him. Then, learning he was a
teacher of the piano in England, and had a sister who sang, he expressed
great satisfaction.
“I like to see my subjects, when there is no need for their services at
home,” he said, “learning about other lands, and bringing also to other
lands the culture of the Fatherland, even as it always gives me pleasure
to see the English here, strengthening by the study of the arts the
bonds that bind our two great nations together. You English must
learn to understand us and our great mission, just as we must learn to
understand you.”
Then the questions became more specialised, and concerned the state
of things in England. He laughed over the disturbances created by the
Suffragettes, was eager to hear what politicians thought about the state
of things in Ireland, made specific inquiries about the Territorial
Force, asked about the Navy, the state of the drama in London, the coal
strike which was threatened in Yorkshire. Then suddenly he put a series
of personal questions.
“And you, you are in the Guards, I think?” he said.
“No, sir; I have just resigned my commission,” said Michael.
“Why? Why is that? Have many of your officers been resigning?”
“I am studying music, Your Majesty,” said Michael.
“I am glad to see you came to Germany to do it. Berlin? You ought to
spend a couple of months in Berlin. Perhaps you are thinking of doing
so.”
He turned round quickly to one of his staff who had approached him.
“Well, what is it?” he said.
Count von Bergmann bowed low.
“The Herr-Director,” he said, “humbly craves to know whether it is Your
Majesty’s pleasure that the opera shall proceed.”
The Kaiser laughed.
“There, Lord Comber,” he said, “you see how I am ordered about. They
wish to cut short my conversation with you. Yes, Bergmann, we will go
on. You will remain with me, Lord Comber, for this act.”
Immediately after the lights were lowered again, the curtain rose, and
a most distracting hour began for Michael. His neighbour was never still
for a single moment. Now he would shift in his chair, now with his hand
he would beat time on the red velvet balustrade in front of him, and a
stream of whispered appreciation and criticism flowed from him.
“They are taking the opening scene a little too slow,” he said. “I shall
call the director’s attention to that. But that crescendo is well done;
yes, that is most effective. The shawl--observe the beautiful lines
into which the shawl falls as she waves it. That is wonderful--a very
impressive entry. Ah, but they should not cross the stage yet; it is
more effective if they remain longer there. Brangane sings finely; she
warns them that the doom is near.”
He gave a little giggle, which reminded Michael of his father.
“Brangane is playing gooseberry, as you say in England,” he said. “A big
gooseberry, is she not? Ah, bravo! bravo! Wunderschon! Yes, enter King
Mark from his hunting. Very fine. Say I was particularly pleased with
the entry of King Mark, Bergmann. A wonderful act! Wagner never touched
greater heights.”
At the end the Emperor rose and again held out his hand.
“I am pleased to have seen you, Lord Comber,” he said. “Do not forget
my message to your father; and take my advice and come to Berlin in the
winter. We are always pleased to see the English in Germany.”
As Michael left the box he ran into the Herr-Director, who had been
summoned to get a few hints.
He went back to join Falbe in a state of republican irritation, which
the honour that had been done him did not at all assuage. There was an
hour’s interval before the third act, and the two drove back to their
hotel to dine there. But Michael found his friend wholly unsympathetic
with his chagrin. To him, it was quite clear, the disappointment of not
having been able to attend very closely to the second act of Tristan was
negligible compared to the cause that had occasioned it. It was possible
for the ordinary mortal to see Tristan over and over again, but to
converse with the Kaiser was a thing outside the range of the average
man. And again in this interval, as during the act itself, Michael
was bombarded with questions. What did the Kaiser say? Did he remember
Ashbridge? Did Michael twice receive the iron grip? Did the All-highest
say anything about the manoeuvres? Did he look tired, or was it only the
light above his head that made him appear so haggard? Even his opinion
about the opera was of interest. Did he express approval?
This was too much for Michael.
“My dear Hermann,” he said, “we alluded very cautiously to the ‘Song to
Aegir’ this morning, and delicately remarked that you had heard it once
and I twice. How can you care what his opinion of this opera is?”
Falbe shook his handsome head, and gesticulated with his fine hands.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You have just been talking to him
himself. I long to hear his every word and intonation. There is the
personality, which to us means so much, in which is summed up all
Germany. It is as if I had spoken to Rule Britannia herself. Would you
not be interested? There is no one in the world who is to his country
what the Kaiser is to us. When you told me he had stayed at Ashbridge I
was thrilled, but I was ashamed lest you should think me snobbish, which
indeed I am not. But now I am past being ashamed.”
He poured out a glass of wine and drank it with a “Hoch!”
“In his hand lies peace and war,” he said. “It is as he pleases. The
Emperor and his Chancellor can make Germany do exactly what they choose,
and if the Chancellor does not agree with the Emperor, the Emperor can
appoint one who does. That is what it comes to; that is why he is as
vast as Germany itself. The Reichstag but advises where he is concerned.
Have you no imagination, Michael? Europe lies in the hand that shook
yours.”
Michael laughed.
“I suppose I must have no imagination,” he said. “I don’t picture it
even now when you point it out.”
Falbe pointed an impressive forefinger.
“But for him,” he said, “England and Germany would have been at each
other’s throats over the business at Agadir. He held the warhounds in
leash--he, their master, who made them.”
“Oh, he made them, anyhow,” said Michael.
“Naturally. It is his business to be ready for any attack on the part of
those who are jealous at our power. The whole Fatherland is a sword
in his hand, which he sheathes. It would long ago have leaped from the
scabbard but for him.”
“Against whom?” asked Michael. “Who is the enemy?”
Falbe hesitated.
“There is no enemy at present,” he said, “but the enemy potentially is
any who tries to thwart our peaceful expansion.”
Suddenly the whole subject tasted bitter to Michael. He recalled,
instinctively, the Emperor’s great curiosity to be informed on English
topics by the ordinary Englishman with whom he had acquaintance.
“Oh, let’s drop it,” he said. “I really didn’t come to Munich to talk
politics, of which I know nothing whatever.”
Falbe nodded.
“That is what I have said to you before,” he remarked. “You are the most
happy-go-lucky of the nations. Did he speak of England?”
“Yes, of his beloved England,” said Michael. “He was extremely cordial
about our relations.”
“Good. I like that,” said Falbe briskly.
“And he recommended me to spend two months in Berlin in the winter,”
added Michael, sliding off on to other topics.
Falbe smiled.
“I like that less,” he said, “since that will mean you will not be in
London.”
“But I didn’t commit myself,” said Michael, smiling back; “though I can
say ‘beloved Germany’ with equal sincerity.”
Falbe got up.
“I would wish that--that you were Kaiser of England,” he said.
“God forbid!” said Michael. “I should not have time to play the piano.”
During the next day or two Michael often found himself chipping at
the bed-rock, so to speak, of this conversation, and Falbe’s revealed
attitude towards his country and, in particular, towards its supreme
head. It seemed to him a wonderful and an enviable thing that anyone
could be so thoroughly English as Falbe certainly was in his ordinary,
everyday life, and that yet, at the back of this there should lie
so profound a patriotism towards another country, and so profound a
reverence to its ruler. In his general outlook on life, his friend
appeared to be entirely of one blood with himself, yet now on two or
three occasions a chance spark had lit up this Teutonic beacon. To
Michael this mixture of nationalities seemed to be a wonderful gift;
it implied a widening of one’s sympathies and outlook, a larger
comprehension of life than was possible to any of undiluted blood.
For himself, like most young Englishmen of his day, he was not conscious
of any tremendous sense of patriotism like this. Somewhere, deep down
in him, he supposed there might be a source, a well of English waters,
which some explosion in his nature might cause to flood him entirely,
but such an idea was purely hypothetical; he did not, in fact, look
forward to such a bouleversement as being a possible contingency. But
with Falbe it was different; quite a small cause, like the sight of
the Rhine at Cologne, or a Bavarian village at sunset, or the fact of a
friend having talked with the Emperor, was sufficient to make his
innate patriotism find outlet in impassioned speech. He wondered vaguely
whether Falbe’s explanation of this--namely, that nationally the English
were prosperous, comfortable and insouciant--was perhaps sound. It
seemed that the notion was not wholly foundationless.