Michael had been practising all the morning of a dark November day, had
eaten a couple of sandwiches standing in front of his fire, and observed
with some secret satisfaction that the fog which had lifted for an
hour had come down on the town again in earnest, and that it was only
reasonable to dismiss the possibility of going out, and spend the
afternoon as he had spent the morning. But he permitted himself a few
minutes’ relaxation as he smoked his cigarette, and sat down by the
window, looking out, in Lucretian mood, on to the very dispiriting
conditions that prevailed in the street.
Though it was still only between one and two in the afternoon, the
densest gloom prevailed, so that it was impossible to see the outlines
even of the houses across the street, and the only evidence that he
was not in some desert spot lay in the fact of a few twinkling lights,
looking incredibly remote, from the windows opposite and the gas-lamps
below. Traffic seemed to be at a standstill; the accustomed roar from
Piccadilly was dumb, and he looked out on to a silent and vapour-swathed
world. This isolation from all his fellows and from the chances of being
disturbed, it may be added, gave him a sense of extreme satisfaction. He
wanted his piano, but no intrusive presence. He liked the sensation of
being shut up in his own industrious citadel, secure from interruption.
During the last two months and a half since his return from Munich he
had experienced greater happiness, had burned with a stronger zest for
life than during the whole of his previous existence. Not only had he
been working at that which he believed he was fitted for, and which gave
him the stimulus which, one way or another, is essential to all good
work, but he had been thrown among people who were similarly employed,
with whom he had this great common ground of kinship in ambition and
aim. No more were the days too long from being but half-filled with work
with which he had no sympathy, and diversions that gave him no pleasure;
none held sufficient hours for all that he wanted to put into it. And in
this busy atmosphere, where his own studies took so much of his time
and energy, and where everybody else was in some way similarly employed,
that dismal self-consciousness which so drearily looked on himself
shuffling along through fruitless, uncongenial days was cracking off him
as the chestnut husk cracks when the kernel within swells and ripens.
Apart from his work, the centre of his life was certainly the household
of the Falbes, where the brother and sister lived with their mother. She
turned out to be in a rather remote manner “one of us,” and had about
her, very faint and dim, like an antique lavender bag, the odour of
Ashbridge. She lived like the lilies of the field, without toiling or
spinning, either literally or with the more figurative work of the mind;
indeed, she can scarcely be said to have had any mind at all, for, as
with drugs, she had sapped it away by a practically unremitting perusal
of all the fiction that makes the average reader wonder why it was
written. In fact, she supplied the answer to that perplexing question,
since it was clearly written for her. She was not in the least excited
by these tales, any more than the human race are excited by the oxygen
in the air, but she could not live without them. She subscribed to three
lending libraries, which, by this time had probably learned her tastes,
for if she ever by ill-chance embarked on a volume which ever so faintly
adumbrated the realities of life, she instantly returned it, as she
found it painful; and, naturally, she did not wish to be pained. This
did not, however, prevent her reading those that dealt with amiable
young men who fell in love with amiable young women, and were for
the moment sundered by red-haired adventuresses or black-haired
moneylenders, for those she found not painful but powerful, and could
often remember where she had got to in them, which otherwise was not
usually the case. She wore a good deal of lace, spoke in a tired voice,
and must certainly have been of the type called “sweetly pretty” some
quarter of a century ago. She drank hot water with her meals, and
continually reminded Michael of his own mother.
Sylvia and Hermann certainly did all that could be done for her; in
other words, they invariably saw that her water was hot, and her stock
of novels replenished. But when that was accomplished, there really
appeared to be little more that could be done for her. Her presence in a
room counted for about as much as a rather powerful shadow on the wall,
unexplained by any solid object which could have made it appear there.
But most of the day she spent in her own room, which was furnished
exactly in accordance with her twilight existence. There was a
writing-table there, which she never used, several low arm-chairs (one
of which she was always using), by each of which was a small table, on
to which she could put the book that she was at the moment engaged on.
Lace hangings, of the sort that prevent anybody either seeing in or out,
obscured the windows; and for decoration there were china figures on the
chimney-piece, plush-rimmed plates on the walls, and a couple of easels,
draped with chiffon, on which stood enlarged photographs of her husband
and her children.
There was, it may be added, nothing in the least pathetic about her,
for, as far as could be ascertained, she had everything she wanted. In
fact, from the standpoint of commonsense, hers was the most successful
existence; for, knowing what she liked, she passed her entire life
in its accomplishment. The only thing that caused her emotion was the
energy and vitality of her two children, and even then that emotion was
but a mild surprise when she recollected how tremendous a worker and
boisterous a gourmand of life was her late husband, on the anniversary
of whose death she always sat all day without reading any novels at all,
but devoted what was left of her mind to the contemplation of nothing
at all. She had married him because, for some inscrutable reason, he
insisted on it; and she had been resigned to his death, as to everything
else that had ever happened to her.
All her life, in fact, she had been of that unchangeable, drab quality
in emotional affairs which is characteristic of advanced middle-age,
when there are no great joys or sorrows to look back on, and no
expectation for the future. She had always had something of the
indestructible quality of frail things like thistledown or cottonwool;
violence and explosion that would blow strong and distinct organisms
to atoms only puffed her a yard or two away where she alighted again
without shock, instead of injuring or annihilating her. . . . Yet, in
the inexplicable ways of love, Sylvia and her brother not only did what
could be done for her, but regarded her with the tenderest affection.
What that love lived on, what was its daily food would be hard to guess,
were it not that love lives on itself.
The rest of the house, apart from the vacuum of Mrs. Falbe’s rooms,
conducted itself, so it seemed to Michael, at the highest possible
pressure. Sylvia and her brother were both far too busy to be restless,
and if, on the one hand, Mrs. Falbe’s remote, impenetrable life was
inexplicable, not less inexplicable was the rage for living that
possessed the other two. From morning till night, and on Sundays from
night till morning, life proceeded at top speed.
As regards household arrangements, which were all in Sylvia’s hands,
there were three fixed points in the day. That is to say, that there
was lunch for Mrs. Falbe and anybody else who happened to be there at
half-past one; tea in Mrs. Falbe’s well-liked sitting-room at five,
and dinner at eight. These meals--Mrs. Falbe always breakfasted in her
bedroom--were served with quiet decorum. Apart from them, anybody who
required anything consulted the cook personally. Hermann, for instance,
would have spent the morning at his piano in the vast studio at the back
of their house in Maidstone Crescent, and not arrived at the fact that
it was lunch time till perhaps three in the afternoon. Unless then he
settled to do without lunch altogether, he must forage for himself; or
Sylvia, having to sing at a concert at eight, would return famished and
exultant about ten; she would then proceed to provide herself, unless
she supped elsewhere, with a plate of eggs and bacon, or anything
else that was easily accessible. It was not from preference that these
haphazard methods were adopted; but since they only kept two servants,
it was clear that a couple of women, however willing, could not possibly
cope with so irregular a commissariat in addition to the series of fixed
hours and the rest of the household work. As it was, two splendidly
efficient persons, one German, the other English, had filled the
posts of parlourmaid and cook for the last eight years, and regarded
themselves, and were regarded, as members of the family. Lucas,
the parlourmaid, indeed, from the intense interest she took in the
conversation at table, could not always resist joining in it, and was
apt to correct Hermann or his sister if she detected an inaccuracy in
their statements. “No, Miss Sylvia,” she would say, “it was on Thursday,
not Wednesday,” and then recollecting herself, would add, “Beg your
pardon, miss.”
In this milieu, as new to Michael as some suddenly discovered country,
he found himself at once plunged and treated with instant friendly
intimacy. Hermann, so he supposed, must have given him a good character,
for he was made welcome before he could have had time to make any
impression for himself, as Hermann’s friend. On the first occasion of
his visiting the house, for the purpose of his music lesson, he had
stopped to lunch afterwards, where he met Sylvia, and was in the
presence of (you could hardly call it more than that) their mother.
Mrs. Falbe had faded away in some mist-like fashion soon after, but it
was evident that he was intended to do no such thing, and they had gone
into the studio, already comrades, and Michael had chiefly listened
while the other two had violent and friendly discussions on every
subject under the sun. Then Hermann happened to sit down at the piano,
and played a Chopin etude pianissimo prestissimo with finger-tips that
just made the notes to sound and no more, and Sylvia told him that he
was getting it better; and then Sylvia sang “Who is Sylvia?” and Hermann
told her that she shouldn’t have eaten so much lunch, or shouldn’t have
sung; and then, by transitions that Michael could not recollect, they
played the Hailstone Chorus out of Israel in Egypt (or, at any rate,
reproduced the spirit of it), and both sang at the top of their voices.
Then, as usually happened in the afternoon, two or three friends dropped
in, and though these were all intimate with their hosts, Michael had no
impression of being out in the cold or among strangers. And when he left
he felt as if he had been stretching out chilly hands to the fire, and
that the fire was always burning there, ready for him to heat himself
at, with its welcoming flames and core of sincere warmth, whenever he
felt so disposed.
At first he had let himself do this much less often than he would have
liked, for the shyness of years, his over-sensitive modesty at his own
want of charm and lightness, was a self-erected barrier in his way. He
was, in spite of his intimacy with Hermann, desperately afraid of being
tiresome, of checking by his presence, as he had so often felt himself
do before, the ease and high spirits of others. But by degrees this
broke down; he realised that he was now among those with whom he had
that kinship of the mind and of tastes which makes the foundation on
which friendship, and whatever friendship may ripen into, is securely
built. Never did the simplicity and sincerity of their welcome fail;
the cordiality which greeted him was always his; he felt that it was
intended that he should be at home there just as much as he cared to be.
The six working days of the week, however, were as a rule too full both
for the Falbes and for Michael to do more than have, apart from the
music lessons, flying glimpses of each other; for the day was taken up
with work, concerts and opera occurred often in the evening, and the
shuttles of London took their threads in divergent directions. But on
Sunday the house at Maidstone Crescent ceased, as Hermann said, to be a
junction, and became a temporary terminus.
“We burst from our chrysalis, in fact,” he said. “If you find it
clearer to understand this way, we burst from our chrysalis and become
a caterpillar. Do chrysalides become caterpillars! We do, anyhow. If
you come about eight you will find food; if you come later you will also
find food of a sketchier kind. People have a habit of dropping in on
Sunday evening. There’s music if anyone feels inclined to make any, and
if they don’t they are made to. Some people come early, others late,
and they stop to breakfast if they wish. It’s a gaudeamus, you know, a
jolly, a jamboree. One has to relax sometimes.”
Michael felt all his old unfitness for dreadful crowds return to him.
“Oh, I’m so bad at that sort of thing,” he said. “I am a frightful
kill-joy, Hermann.”
Hermann sat down on the treble part of his piano.
“That’s the most conceited thing I’ve heard you say yet,” he remarked.
“Nobody will pay any attention to you; you won’t kill anybody’s joy.
Also it’s rather rude of you.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” said Michael.
“Then we must suppose you were rude by accident. That is the worst sort
of rudeness.”
“I’m sorry; I’ll come,” said Michael.
“That’s right. You might even find yourself enjoying it by accident, you
know. If you don’t, you can go away. There’s music; Sylvia sings quite
seriously sometimes, and other people sing or bring violins, and those
who don’t like it, talk--and then we get less serious. Have a try,
Michael. See if you can’t be less serious, too.”
Michael slipped despairingly from his seat.
“If only I knew how!” he said. “I believe my nurse never taught me to
play, only to remember that I was a little gentleman. All the same, when
I am with you, or with my cousin Francis, I can manage it to a certain
extent.”
Falbe looked at him encouragingly.
“Oh, you’re getting on,” he said. “You take yourself more for granted
than you used to. I remember you when you used to be polite on purpose.
It’s doing things on purpose that makes one serious. If you ever play
the fool on purpose, you instantly cease playing the fool.”
“Is that it?” said Michael.
“Yes, of course. So come on Sunday, and forget all about it, except
coming. And now, do you mind going away? I want to put in a couple of
hours before lunch. You know what to practise till Tuesday, don’t you?”
That was the first Sunday evening that Michael had spent with his
friends; after that, up till this present date in November, he had not
missed a single one of those gatherings. They consisted almost entirely
of men, and of the men there were many types, and many ages. Actors and
artists, musicians and authors were indiscriminately mingled; it was the
strangest conglomeration of diverse interests. But one interest, so it
seemed to Michael, bound them all together; they were all doing in their
different lives the things they most delighted in doing. There was the
key that unlocked all the locks--namely, the enjoyment that inspired
their work. The freemasonry of art and the freemasonry of the eager mind
that looks out without verdict, but with only expectation and delight in
experiment, passed like an open secret among them, secret because none
spoke of it, open because it was so transparently obvious. And since
this was so, every member of that heterogeneous community had a respect
for his companions; the fact that they were there together showed that
they had all passed this initiation, and knew what for them life meant.
Very soon after dinner all sitting accommodation, other than the floor,
was occupied; but then the floor held the later comers, and the
smoke from many cigarettes and the babble of many voices made a
constantly-ascending incense before the altar dedicated to the gods that
inspire all enjoyable endeavour. Then Sylvia sang, and both those who
cared to hear exquisite singing and those who did not were alike silent,
for this was a prayer to the gods they all worshipped; and Falbe played,
and there was a quartet of strings.
After that less serious affairs held the rooms; an eminent actor was
pleased to parody another eminent actor who was also present. This led
to a scene in which each caricatured the other, and a French poet did
gymnastic feats on the floor and upset a tray of soda-water, and a
German conductor fluffed out his hair and died like Marguerite. And when
in the earlier hours of the morning part of the guests had gone away,
and part were broiling ham in the kitchen, Sylvia sang again, quite
seriously, and Michael, in Hermann’s absence, volunteered to play her
accompaniment for her. She stood behind him, and by a finger on his
shoulder directed him in the way she would have him go. Michael found
himself suddenly and inexplicably understanding this; her finger, by its
pressure or its light tapping, seemed to him to speak in a language that
he found himself familiar with, and he slowed down stroking the notes,
or quickened with staccato touch, as she wordlessly directed him.
Out of all these things, which were but trivialities, pleasant,
unthinking hours for all else concerned, several points stood out for
Michael, points new and illuminating. The first was the simplicity of it
all, the spontaneousness with which pleasure was born if only you took
off your clothes, so to speak, and left them on the bank while you
jumped in. All his life he had buttoned his jacket and crammed his hat
on to his head. The second was the sense, indefinable but certain, that
Hermann and Sylvia between them were the high priests of this memorable
orgie.
He himself had met, at dreadful, solemn evenings when Lady Ashbridge and
his father stood at the head of the stairs, the two eminent actors who
had romped to-night, and found them exceedingly stately personages, just
as no doubt they had found him an icy and awkward young man. But they,
like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their
environment. Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but
Michael’s imagination quailed before such a supposition.
The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him
more and more, was the personality of Sylvia. He had never come across
a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not
attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals,
winked across from one to the other, of human companionship. Always
he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his
self-consciousness, thought about what he should say. There had been the
cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled
and deterred him. But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in
her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal
of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating
than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help
her singing. And even while Michael registered to himself this charming
annihilation of sex, which allowed her to be to him no more than her
brother was--less, in fact, but on the same plane--she had come to
the end of her song, patted him on the back, as she would have patted
anybody else, with a word of thanks, and, for him, suddenly leaped into
significance. It was not only a singer who had sung, but an individual
one called Sylvia Falbe. She took her place, at present a most
inconspicuous one, on the back-cloth before which Michael’s life was
acted, towards which, when no action, so to speak, was taking place,
his eyes naturally turned themselves. His father and mother were there,
Francis also and Aunt Barbara, and of course, larger than the rest,
Hermann. Now Sylvia was discernible, and, as the days went by and
their meetings multiplied, she became bigger, walked into a nearer
perspective. It did not occur to Michael, rightly, to imagine himself at
all in love with her, for he was not. Only she had asserted herself on
his consciousness.
Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either
external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the
splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather
that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarrassments
which that sex had always held for him. She grew in comradeship; he
found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her
charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael
to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same
warm, welcoming kindliness--the same complete absence of pose. You knew
where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the
young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished
that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none
of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly
the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the multitude
which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they
with her, in relationship entirely unsentimental.
But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael’s
most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe’s principles in
teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school;
he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the
hours.
“What is the good of them?” he asked. “They can only give you nimbleness
and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by
playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or
Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may
choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that
way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written
language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you
precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it
aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the
fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys
its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud
to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that
you don’t understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the
words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read
carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like
if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try.”
Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.
“There,” he said, “begin at the top of the page.”
“But I can’t,” said Michael. “I shall have to spell it out.”
“That’s just what you mustn’t do. Go ahead, and don’t pause till you get
to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its
turn, and play as many notes as you can in it.”
This was a dismal experience. Michael hitherto had gone on the
painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious
care. Now Falbe’s inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in
inextinguishable laughter.
“Go on, go on!” he shouted. “I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly
Strauss’s Don Quixote.”
Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way
through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe’s laughter.
“Oh dear,” he said. “Very funny. But don’t laugh so at me, Hermann.”
Falbe dried his eyes.
“And what was it?” he said. “I declare it was the fourth fugue. An
entirely different conception of it! A thoroughly original view! Now,
what you’ve got to do, is to repeat that--not the same murder I mean,
but other murders--for a couple of hours a day. . . . By degrees--you
won’t believe it--you will find you are not murdering any longer, but
only mortally wounding. After six months I dare say you won’t even be
hurting your victims. All the same, you can begin with less muscular
ones.”
In this way Michael’s musical horizons were infinitely extended. Not
only did this system of Falbe’s of flying at new music, and going
recklessly and regardlessly on, give quickness to his brain and finger,
make his wits alert to pick up the new language he was learning, but
it gloriously extended his vision and his range of country. He ran
joyfully, though with a thousand falls and tumbles, through these new
and wonderful vistas; he worshipped at the grave, Gothic sanctuaries of
Beethoven, he roamed through the enchanted garden of Chopin, he felt the
icy and eternal frosts of Russia, and saw in the northern sky the great
auroras spread themselves in spear and sword of fire; he listened to the
wisdom of Brahms, and passed through the noble and smiling country
of Bach. All this, so to speak, was holiday travel, and between his
journeys he applied himself with the same eager industry to the learning
of his art, so that he might reproduce for himself and others true
pictures of the scenes through which he scampered. Here Falbe was not so
easily moved to laughter; he was as severe with Michael as he was with
himself, when it was the question of learning some piece with a view
to really playing it. There was no light-hearted hurrying on through
blurred runs and false notes, slurred phrases and incomplete chords.
Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude
of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed
piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was
played again on Falbe’s great Steinway, as a professed performance, a
very different standard was required.
Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.
“This won’t do, Michael,” he said. “You played it before for me to see
whether you could play. You can. But it won’t do to sketch it. Every
note has got to be there; Chopin didn’t write them by accident. He knew
quite well what he was about. Begin again, please.”
This time Michael got not quite so far, when he was stopped again. He
was playing without notes, and Falbe got up from his chair where he had
the book open, and put it on the piano.
“Do you find difficulty in memorising?” he asked.
This was discouraging; Michael believed that he remembered easily; he
also believed that he had long known this by heart.
“No; I thought I knew it,” he said.
“Try again.”
This time Falbe stood by him, and suddenly put his finger down into the
middle of Michael’s hands, striking a note.
“You left out that F sharp,” he said. “Go on. . . . Now you are leaving
out that E natural. Try to get it better by Thursday, and remember this,
that playing, and all that differentiates playing from strumming, only
begins when you can play all the notes that are put down for you to
play without fail. You’re beginning at the wrong end; you have admirable
feeling about that prelude, but you needn’t think about feeling till
you’ve got all the notes at your fingers’ ends. Then and not till then,
you may begin to remember that you want to be a pianist. Now, what’s the
next thing?”
Michael felt somewhat squashed and discouraged. He had thought he had
really worked successfully at the thing he knew so well by sight. His
heavy eyebrows drew together.
“You told me to harmonise that Christmas carol,” he remarked, rather
shortly.
Falbe put his hand on his shoulder.
“Look here, Michael,” he said, “you’re vexed with me. Now, there’s
nothing to be vexed at. You know quite well you were leaving out lots of
notes from those jolly fat chords, and that you weren’t playing cleanly.
Now I’m taking you seriously, and I won’t have from you anything but
the best you can do. You’re not doing your best when you don’t even play
what is written. You can’t begin to work at this till you do that.”
Michael had a moment’s severe tussle with his temper. He felt vexed and
disappointed that Hermann should have sent him back like a schoolboy
with his exercise torn over. Not immediately did he confess to himself
that he was completely in the wrong.
“I’m doing the best I can,” he said. “It’s rather discouraging.”
He moved his big shoulders slightly, as if to indicate that Hermann’s
hand was not wanted there. Hermann kept it there.
“It might be discouraging,” he said, “if you were doing your best.”
Michael’s ill-temper oozed from him.
“I’m wrong,” he said, turning round with the smile that made his ugly
face so pleasant. “And I’m sorry both that I have been slack and that
I’ve been sulky. Will that do?”
Falbe laughed.
“Very well indeed,” he said. “Now for ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ Wasn’t
it--”
“Yes; I got awfully interested over it, Hermann. I thought I would try
and work it up into a few variations.”
“Let’s hear,” said Falbe.
This was a vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and
a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple
little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the
half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature
handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen
presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure;
it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of
itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid
octaves, and finally asserted itself, heard once more, over a great
scale base of bells.
Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but
receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done
over Michael’s fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up
with a certain excitement.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” he said. “You’ve done something that’s
really good. Faults? Yes, millions; but there’s a first-rate imagination
at the bottom of it. How did it happen?”
Michael flushed with pleasure.
“Oh, they sang themselves,” he said, “and I learned them. But will it
really do? Is there anything in it?”
“Yes, old boy, there’s King Wenceslas in it, and you’ve dressed him up
well. Play that last one again.”
The last one was taxing to the fingers, but Michael’s big hands banged
out the octave scale in the bass with wonderful ease, and Falbe gave a
great guffaw of pleasure at the rollicking conclusion.
“Write them all down,” he said, “and try if you can hear it singing half
a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to
play the lot at my concert in January.”
Michael gasped.
“You don’t mean that?” he said.
“Certainly I do. It’s a fine bit of stuff.”
It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that
Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits
of the air--whatever those melodious sprites may be--had for the last
month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further
variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now,
as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing;
their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed
himself, and they haunted him no longer. At present he had but jotted
down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it
gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of
his own brain, setting Falbe his task.
But he felt much more than this. He had done something. Michael, the
dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of
music. All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate,
unable, so it had seemed to him, to show himself, to let himself out.
And not till now, when he had found this means of access, did he know
how passionately he had desired it, nor how immensely, in the process
of so doing, his desire had grown. He must find out more ways, other
channels of projecting himself. The need for that, as of a diver
throwing himself into the empty air and the laughing waters below him,
suddenly took hold of him.
He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages,
and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it:
VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.
By
Michael Comber.
He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.
“Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe,” he wrote at the top.