Michael had been so engrossingly employed since his return to London in
the autumn that the existence of other ties and other people apart from
those immediately connected with his work had worn a very shadow-like
aspect. He had, it is true, written with some regularity to his mother,
finding, somewhat to his dismay, how very slight the common ground
between them was for purposes of correspondence. He could outline the
facts that he had been to several concerts, that he had seen much of
his music-master, that he had been diligent at his work, but he realised
that there was nothing in detail about those things that could possibly
interest her, and that nothing except them really interested him. She
on her side had little to say except to record the welfare of Petsy, to
remark on the beauty of October, and tell him how many shooting parties
they had had.
His correspondence with his father had been less frequent, and
absolutely one-sided, since Lord Ashbridge took no notice at all of his
letters. Michael regretted this, as showing that he was still outcast,
but it cannot be said to have come between him and the sunshine, for he
had begun to manufacture the sunshine within, that internal happiness
which his environment and way of life produced, which seemed to be
independent of all that was not directly connected with it. But a letter
which he received next morning from his mother stated, in addition to
the fact that Petsy had another of her tiresome bilious attacks (poor
lamb), that his father and she thought it right that he should come down
to Ashbridge for Christmas. It conveyed the sense that at this joyful
season a truce, probably limited in duration, and, even while it lasted,
of the nature of a strongly-armed neutrality, was proclaimed, but the
prospect was not wholly encouraging, for Lady Ashbridge added that
she hoped Michael would not “go on” vexing his father. What precisely
Michael was expected to do in order to fulfil that wish was not further
stated, but he wrote dutifully enough to say that he would come down at
Christmas.
But the letter rekindled his dormant sense of there being other people
in the world beside his immediate circle; also, indefinably, it gave
him the sense that his mother wanted him. That should be so then, and
sequentially he remembered with a pang of self-reproach that he had not
as much as indicated his presence in London to Aunt Barbara, or set eyes
on her since their meeting in August. He knew she was in London, since
he had seen her name in some paragraph in the papers not long before,
and instantly wrote to ask her to dine with him at a near date. Her
answer was characteristic.
“Of course I’ll dine with you, my dear,” she wrote; “it will be
delightful. And what has happened to you? Your letter actually conveyed
a sense of cordiality. You never used to be cordial. And I wish to meet
some of your nice friends. Ask one or two, please--a prima donna of some
kind and a pianist, I think. I want them weird and original--the prima
donna with short hair, and the pianist with long. In Tony’s new station
in life I never see anybody except the sort of people whom your father
likes. Are you forgiven yet, by the way?”
Michael found himself on the grin at the thought of Aunt Barbara
suddenly encountering the two magnificent Falbes (prima donna and
pianist exactly as she had desired) as representing the weird sort of
people whom she pictured his living among, and the result quite came
up to his expectations. As usual, Aunt Barbara was late, and came in
talking rapidly about the various causes that had detained her, which
her fruitful imagination had suggested to her as she dressed. In order,
perhaps, to suit herself to the circle in which she would pass the
evening, she had put on (or, rather, it looked as if her maid had thrown
at her) a very awful sort of tea-gown, brown and prickly-looking, and
adapted to Bohemian circles. She, with the same lively imagination, had
pictured Michael in a velveteen coat and soft shirt, the pianist as very
small, with spectacles and long hair, and the prima donna a full-blown
kind of barmaid with Roman pearls. . . .
“Yes, my dear, I know I am late,” she began before she was inside the
door, “but Og had so much to say, and there was a block at Hyde Park
Corner. My dear Michael, how smart you look!”
She came round the corner of the screen and the Falbes burst upon her,
Hermann and Sylvia standing by the fire. For the short, spectacled
pianist there was this very tall, English-looking young man, upright and
soldierly, with his handsome, boyish face and well-fitting clothes. That
was bad enough, but infinitely worse was she who was to have been the
full-blown barmaid. Instead was this magnificent girl, nearly as tall as
her brother, with her small oval face crowning the column of her neck,
her eyes merry, her mouth laughing at some brotherly retort that Hermann
had just made. Aunt Barbara took her in with one second’s survey--her
face, her neck, her beautiful dress, her whole air of ease and
good-breeding, and gave a despairing glance at her own prickly tea-gown.
For the moment, amiably accustomed as she was to laugh at herself, she
did not find it humourous.
“Miss Sylvia Falbe, Aunt Barbara,” said Michael with a little tremor
in his voice; “and Mr. Hermann Falbe, Lady Barbara Jerome,” he added,
rather as if he expected nobody to believe it.
Aunt Barbara made the best of it: shook hands in her jolly manner, and
burst into laughter.
“Michael, I could slay you,” she said; “but before I do that I must tell
your friends all about it. This horrible nephew of mine, Miss Falbe,
promised me two weird musicians, and I expected--I really can’t tell you
what I expected--but there were to be spectacles and velveteen coats and
the general air of an afternoon concert at Clapham Junction. But it is
nice to be made such a fool of. I feel precisely like an elderly and
sour governess who has been ordered to come down to dinner so that
there shan’t be thirteen. Give me your arm, Mr. Falbe, and take me in
to dinner at once, where I may drown my embarrassment in soup. Or does
Michael go in first? Go on, wretch!”
Presently they were seated at dinner, and Aunt Barbara could not help
enlarging a little on her own discomfiture.
“It is all your fault, Michael,” she said. “You have been in London all
these weeks without letting me know anything about you or your friends,
or what you were doing; so naturally I supposed you were leading some
obscure kind of existence. Instead of which I find this sort of thing.
My dear, what good soup! I shall see if I can’t induce your cook to
leave you. But bachelors always have the best of everything. Now tell
me about your visit to Germany. Which was the point where we
parted--Baireuth, wasn’t it? I would not go to Baireuth with anybody!”
“I went with Mr. Falbe,” said Michael.
“Ah, Mr. Falbe has not asked me yet. I may have to revise what I say,”
said Aunt Barbara daringly.
“I didn’t ask Michael,” said Hermann. “I got into his carriage as the
train was moving; and my luggage was left behind.”
“I was left behind,” said Sylvia, “which was worse. But I sent Hermann’s
luggage.”
“So expeditiously that it arrived the day before we left for Munich,”
remarked Hermann.
“And that’s all the gratitude I get. But in the interval you lived upon
Lord Comber.”
“I do still in the money I earn by giving him music lessons. Mike, have
you finished the Variations yet?”
“Variations--what are Variations?” asked Aunt Barbara.
“Yes, two days ago. Variations are all the things you think about on the
piano, Aunt Barbara, when you are playing a tune made by somebody else.”
“Should I like them? Will Mr. Falbe play them to me?” asked she.
“I daresay he will if he can. But I thought you loathed music.”
“It certainly depends on who makes it,” said Aunt Barbara. “I don’t like
ordinary music, because the person who made it doesn’t matter to me.
But if, so to speak, it sounds like somebody I know, it is a different
matter.”
Michael turned to Sylvia.
“I want to ask your leave for something I have already done,” he said.
“And if I don’t give it you?”
“Then I shan’t tell you what it is.”
Sylvia looked at him with her candid friendly eyes. Her brother always
told her that she never looked at anybody except her friends; if she was
engaged in conversation with a man she did not like, she looked at his
shirt-stud or at a point slightly above his head.
“Then, of course, I give in,” she said. “I must give you leave if
otherwise I shan’t know what you have done. But it’s a mean trick. Tell
me at once.”
“I’ve dedicated the Variations to you,” he said.
Sylvia flushed with pleasure.
“Oh, but that’s absolutely darling of you,” she said. “Have you, really?
Do you mean it?”
“If you’ll allow me.”
“Allow you? Hermann, the Variations are mine. Isn’t it too lovely?”
It was at this moment that Aunt Barbara happened to glance at Michael,
and it suddenly struck her that it was a perfectly new Michael whom she
looked at. She knew and was secretly amused at the fiasco that always
attended the introduction of amiable young ladies to Ashbridge, and had
warned her sister-in-law that Michael, when he chose the girl he wanted,
would certainly do it on his own initiative. Now she felt sure that
Michael, though he might not be aware of it himself, was, even if he had
not chosen, beginning to choose. There was that in his eyes which
none of the importations to Ashbridge had ever seen there, that eager
deferential attention, which shows that a young man is interested
because it is a girl he is talking to. That, she knew, had never been
characteristic of Michael; indeed, it would not have been far from the
truth to say that the fact that he was talking to a girl was sufficient
to make his countenance wear an expression of polite boredom. Then for a
while, as dinner progressed, she doubted the validity of her conclusion,
for the Michael who was entertaining her to-night was wholly different
from the Michael she had known and liked and pitied. She felt that she
did not know this new one yet, but she was certain that she liked him,
and equally sure that she did not pity him at all. He had found his
place, he had found his work; he evidently fitted into his life, which,
after all, is the surest ground of happiness, and it might be that it
was only general joy, so to speak, that kindled that pleasant fire in
his face. And then once more she went back to her first conclusion, for
talking to Michael herself she saw, as a woman so infallibly sees, that
he gave her but the most superficial attention--sufficient, indeed, to
allow him to answer intelligently and laugh at the proper places, but
his mind was not in the least occupied with her. If Sylvia moved his
glance flickered across in her direction: it was she who gave him his
alertness. Aunt Barbara felt that she could have told him truthfully
that he was in love with her, and she rather thought that it would be
news to him; probably he did not know it yet himself. And she wondered
what his father would say when he knew it.
“And then Munich,” she said, violently recalling Michael’s attention
towards her. “Munich I could have borne better than Baireuth, and when
Mr. Falbe asks me there I shall probably go. Your Uncle Tony was in
Germany then, by the way; he went over at the invitation of the Emperor
to the manoeuvres.”
“Did he? The Emperor came to Munich for a day during them. He was at the
opera,” said Michael.
“You didn’t speak to him, I suppose?” she asked.
“Yes; he sent for me, and talked a lot. In fact, he talked too much,
because I didn’t hear a note of the second act.”
Aunt Barbara became infinitely more interested.
“Tell me all about it, Michael,” she said. “What did he talk about?”
“Everything, as far as I can remember, England, Ashbridge, armies,
navies, music. Hermann says he cast pearls before swine--”
“And his tone, his attitude?” she asked.
“Towards us?--towards England? Immensely friendly, and most inquisitive.
I was never asked so many questions in so short a time.”
Aunt Barbara suddenly turned to Falbe.
“And you?” she asked. “Were you with Michael?”
“No, Lady Barbara. I had no pearls.”
“And are you naturalised English?” she asked.
“No; I am German.”
She slid swiftly off the topic.
“Do you wonder I ask, with your talking English so perfectly?” she said.
“You should hear me talking French when we are entertaining Ambassadors
and that sort of persons. I talk it so fast that nobody can understand a
word I say. That is a defensive measure, you must observe, because even
if I talked it quite slowly they would understand just as little. But
they think it is the pace that stupefies them, and they leave me in a
curious, dazed condition. And now Miss Falbe and I are going to leave
you two. Be rather a long time, dear Michael, so that Mr. Falbe can tell
you what he thinks of me, and his sister shall tell me what she thinks
of you. Afterwards you and I will tell each other, if it is not too
fearful.”
This did not express quite accurately Lady Barbara’s intentions, for she
chiefly wanted to find out what she thought of Sylvia.
“And you are great friends, you three?” she said as they settled
themselves for the prolonged absence of the two men.
Sylvia smiled; she smiled, Aunt Barbara noticed, almost entirely with
her eyes, using her mouth only when it came to laughing; but her eyes
smiled quite charmingly.
“That’s always rather a rash thing to pronounce on,” she said. “I can
tell you for certain that Hermann and I are both very fond of him, but
it is presumptuous for us to say that he is equally devoted to us.”
“My dear, there is no call for modesty about it,” said Barbara. “Between
you--for I imagine it is you who have done it--between you you have made
a perfectly different creature of the boy. You’ve made him flower.”
Sylvia became quite grave.
“Oh, I do hope he likes us,” she said. “He is so likable himself.”
Barbara nodded
“And you’ve had the good sense to find that out,” she said. “It’s
astonishing how few people knew it. But then, as I said, Michael hadn’t
flowered. No one understood him, or was interested. Then he suddenly
made up his mind last summer what he wanted to do and be, and
immediately did and was it.”
“I think he told Hermann,” said she. “His father didn’t approve, did
he?”
“Approve? My dear, if you knew my brother you would know that the only
things he approves of are those which Michael isn’t.”
Sylvia spread her fine hands out to the blaze, warming them and shading
her face.
“Michael always seems to us--” she began. “Ah, I called him Michael by
mistake.”
“Then do it on purpose next time,” remarked Barbara. “What does Michael
seem?”
“Ah, but don’t let him know I called him Michael,” said Sylvia in some
horror. “There is nothing so awful as to speak of people formally to
their faces, and intimately behind their backs. But Hermann is always
talking of him as Michael.”
“And Michael always seems--”
“Oh, yes; he always seems to me to have been part of us, of Hermann and
me, for years. He’s THERE, if you know what I mean, and so few people
are there. They walk about your life, and go in and out, so to speak,
but Michael stops. I suppose it’s because he is so natural.”
Aunt Barbara had been a diplomatist long before her husband, and fearful
of appearing inquisitive about Sylvia’s impression of Michael, which she
really wanted to inquire into, instantly changed the subject.
“Ah, everybody who has got definite things to do is natural,” she said.
“It is only the idle people who have leisure to look at themselves in
the glass and pose. And I feel sure that you have definite things to do
and plenty of them, my dear. What are they?”
“Oh, I sing a little,” said Sylvia.
“That is the first unnatural thing you have said. I somehow feel that
you sing a great deal.”
Aunt Barbara suddenly got up.
“My dear, you are not THE Miss Falbe, are you, who drove London crazy
with delight last summer. Don’t tell me you are THE Miss Falbe?”
Sylvia laughed.
“Do you know, I’m afraid I must be,” she said. “Isn’t it dreadful to
have to say that after your description?”
Aunt Barbara sat down again, in a sort of calm despair.
“If there are any more shocks coming for me to-night,” she said, “I
think I had better go home. I have encountered a perfectly new nephew
Michael. I have dressed myself like a suburban housekeeper to meet a
Poiret, so don’t deny it, and having humourously told Michael I wished
to see a prima donna and a pianist, he takes me at my word and produces
THE Miss Falbe. I’m glad I knew that in time; I should infallibly have
asked you to sing, and if you had done so--you are probably good-natured
enough to have done even that--I should have given the drawing-room
gasp at the end, and told your brother that I thought you sang very
prettily.”
Sylvia laughed.
“But really it wasn’t my fault, Lady Barbara,” she said. “When we met I
couldn’t have said, ‘Beware! I am THE Miss Falbe.’”
“No, my dear; but I think you ought, somehow, to have conveyed the
impression that you were a tremendous swell. You didn’t. I have been
thinking of you as a charming girl, and nothing more.”
“But that’s quite good enough for me,” said Sylvia.
The two young men joined them after this, and Hermann speedily became
engrossed in reading the finished Variations. Some of these pleased him
mightily; one he altogether demurred to.
“It’s just a crib, Mike,” he said. “The critics would say I had
forgotten it, and put in instead what I could remember of a variation
out of the Handel theme. That next one’s, oh, great fun. But I wish
you would remember that we all haven’t got great orang-outang paws like
you.”
Aunt Barbara stopped in the middle of her sentence; she knew Michael’s
old sensitiveness about these physical disabilities, and she had a
moment’s cold horror at the thought of Falbe having said so miserably
tactless a thing to him. But the horror was of infinitesimal duration,
for she heard Michael’s laugh as they leaned over the top of the piano
together.
“I wish you had, Hermann,” he said. “I know you’ll bungle those tenths.”
Falbe moved to the piano-seat.
“Oh, let’s have a shot at it,” he said. “If Lady Barbara won’t mind,
play that one through to me first, Mike.”
“Oh, presently, Hermann,” he said. “It makes such an infernal row that
you can’t hear anything else afterwards. Do sing, Miss Sylvia; my aunt
won’t really mind--will you, Aunt Barbara?”
“Michael, I have just learned that this is THE Miss Falbe,” she said. “I
am suffering from shock. Do let me suffer from coals of fire, too.”
Michael gently edged Hermann away from the music-stool. Much as he
enjoyed his master’s accompaniment he was perfectly sure that he
preferred, if possible, to play for Sylvia himself than have the
pleasure of listening to anybody else.
“And may I play for you, Miss Sylvia?” he asked.
“Yes, will you? Thanks, Lord Comber.”
Hermann moved away.
“And so Mr. Hermann sits down by Lady Barbara while Lord Comber plays
for Miss Sylvia,” he observed, with emphasis on the titles.
A sudden amazing boldness seized Michael.
“Sylvia, then,” he said.
“All right, Michael,” answered the girl, laughing.
She came and stood on the left of the piano, slightly behind him.
“And what are we going to have?” asked Michael.
“It must be something we both know, for I’ve brought no music,” said
she.
Michael began playing the introduction to the Hugo Wolff song which
he had accompanied for her one Sunday night at their house. He knew it
perfectly by heart, but stumbled a little over the difficult syncopated
time. This was not done without purpose, for the next moment he felt her
hand on his shoulder marking it for him.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Now you’ve got it.” And Michael smiled
sweetly at his own amazing ingenuity.
Hermann put down the Variations, which he still had in his hand, when
Sylvia’s voice began. Unaccustomed as she was to her accompanist, his
trained ear told him that she was singing perfectly at ease, and was
completely at home with her player. Occasionally she gave Michael some
little indication, as she had done before, but for the most part her
fingers rested immobile on his shoulder, and he seemed to understand
her perfectly. Somehow this was a surprise to him; he had not known that
Michael possessed that sort of second-sight that unerringly feels and
translates into the keys the singer’s mood. For himself he always had to
attend most closely when he was playing for his sister, but familiar as
he was with her singing, he felt that Michael divined her certainly as
well as himself, and he listened to the piano more than to the voice.
“You extraordinary creature,” he said when the song was over. “Where did
you learn to accompany?”
Suddenly Michael felt an access of shyness, as if he had been surprised
when he thought himself private.
“Oh, I’ve played it before for Miss--I mean for Sylvia,” he said.
Then he turned to the girl.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “And I’m greedy. May we have one more?”
He slid into the opening bars of “Who is Sylvia?” That song, since
he had heard her sing it at her recital in the summer, had grown in
significance to him, even as she had. It had seemed part of her then,
but then she was a stranger. To-night it was even more intimately part
of her, and she was a friend.
Hermann strolled across to the fireplace at the end of this, and lit a
cigarette.
“My sister’s a blatant egoist, Lady Barbara,” he said. “She loves
singing about herself. And she lays it on pretty thick, too, doesn’t
she? Now, Sylvia, if you’ve finished--quite finished, I mean--do come
and sit down and let me try these Variations--”
“Shall we surrender, Michael?” asked the girl. “Or shall we stick to the
piano, now we’ve got it? If Hermann once sits down, you know, we shan’t
get him away for the rest of the evening. I can’t sing any more, but we
might play a duet to keep him out.”
Hermann rushed to the piano, took his sister by the shoulders, and
pushed her into a chair.
“You sit there,” he said, “and listen to something not about yourself.
Michael, if you don’t come away from that piano, I shall take Sylvia
home at once. Now you may all talk as much as you like; you won’t
interrupt me one atom--but you’ll have to talk loud in certain parts.”
Then a feat of marvellous execution began. Michael had taken an evil
pleasure in giving his master, for whom he slaved with so unwearied a
diligence, something that should tax his powers, and he gave a great
crash of laughter when for a moment Hermann was brought to a complete
standstill in an octave passage of triplets against quavers, and the
performer exultantly joined in it, as he pushed his hair back from his
forehead, and made a second attempt.
“It isn’t decent to ask a fellow to read that,” he shouted. “It’s a
crime; it’s a scandal.”
“My dear, nobody asked you to read it,” said Sylvia.
“Silence, you chit! Mike, come here a minute. Sit down one second and
play that. Promise to get up again, though, immediately. Just these
three bars--yes, I see. An orang-outang apparently can do it, so why
not I? Am I not much better than they? Go away, please; or, rather, stop
there and turn over. Why couldn’t you have finished the page with the
last act, and started this one fresh, instead of making this Godforsaken
arrangement? Now!”
A very simple little minuet measure followed this outrageous passage,
and Hermann’s exquisite lightness of touch made it sound strangely
remote, as if from a mile away, or a hundred years ago, some graceful
echo was evoked again. Then the little dirge wept for the memories
of something that had never happened, and leaving out the number he
disapproved of, as reminiscent of the Handel theme, Hermann gathered
himself up again for the assertion of the original tune, with its bars
of scale octaves. The contagious jollity of it all seized the others,
and Sylvia, with full voice, and Aunt Barbara, in a strange hooting,
sang to it.
Then Hermann banged out the last chord, and jumped up from his seat,
rolling up the music.
“I go straight home,” he said, “and have a peaceful hour with it.
Michael, old boy, how did you do it? You’ve been studying seriously for
a few months only, and so this must all have been in you before. And
you’ve come to the age you are without letting any of it out. I suppose
that’s why it has come with a rush. You knew it all along, while you
were wasting your time over drilling your toy soldiers. Come on, Sylvia,
or I shall go without you. Good night, Lady Barbara. Half-past ten
to-morrow, Michael.”
Protest was clearly useless; and, having seen the two off, Michael came
upstairs again to Aunt Barbara, who had no intention of going away just
yet.
“And so these are the people you have been living with,” she said. “No
wonder you had not time to come and see me. Do they always go that sort
of pace--it is quicker than when I talk French.”
Michael sank into a chair.
“Oh, yes, that’s Hermann all over,” he said. “But--but just think what
it means to me! He’s going to play my tunes at his concert. Michael
Comber, Op. 1. O Lord! O Lord!”
“And you just met him in the train?” said Aunt Barbara.
“Yes; second class, Victoria Station, with Sylvia on the platform. I
didn’t much notice Sylvia then.”
This and the inference that naturally followed was as much as could be
expected, and Aunt Barbara did not appear to wait for anything more on
the subject of Sylvia. She had seen sufficient of the situation to
know where Michael was most certainly bound for. Yet the very fact of
Sylvia’s outspoken friendliness with him made her wonder a little as to
what his reception would be. She would hardly have said so plainly that
she and her brother were devoted to him if she had been devoted to him
with that secret tenderness which, in its essentials, is reticent about
itself. Her half-hour’s conversation with the girl had given her a
certain insight into her; still more had her attitude when she stood by
Michael as he played for her, and put her hand on his shoulder precisely
as she would have done if it had been another girl who was seated at the
piano. Without doubt Michael had a real existence for her, but there
was no sign whatever that she hailed it, as a girl so unmistakably does,
when she sees it as part of herself.
“More about them,” she said. “What are they? Who are they?”
He outlined for her, giving the half-English, half-German parentage, the
shadow-like mother, the Bavarian father, Sylvia’s sudden and comet-like
rising in the musical heaven, while her brother, seven years her senior,
had spent his time in earning in order to give her the chance which she
had so brilliantly taken. Now it was to be his turn, the shackles of his
drudgery no longer impeded him, and he, so Michael radiantly prophesied,
was to have his rocket-like leap to the zenith, also.
“And he’s German?” she asked.
“Yes. Wasn’t he rude about my being a toy soldier? But that’s the
natural German point of view, I suppose.”
Michael strolled to the fireplace.
“Hermann’s so funny,” he said. “For days and weeks together you would
think he was entirely English, and then a word slips from him like that,
which shows he is entirely German. He was like that in Munich, when the
Emperor appeared and sent for me.”
Aunt Barbara drew her chair a little nearer the fire, and sat up.
“I want to hear about that,” she said.
“But I’ve told you; he was tremendously friendly in a national manner.”
“And that seemed to you real?” she asked.
Michael considered.
“I don’t know that it did,” he said. “It all seemed to me rather
feverish, I think.”
“And he asked quantities of questions, I think you said.”
“Hundreds. He was just like what he was when he came to Ashbridge. He
reviewed the Yeomanry, and shot pheasants, and spent the afternoon in a
steam launch, apparently studying the deep-water channel of the river,
where it goes underneath my father’s place; and then in the evening
there was a concert.”
Aunt Barbara did not heed the concert.
“Do you mean the channel up from Harwich,” she asked, “of which the
Admiralty have the secret chart?”
“I fancy they have,” said Michael. “And then after the concert there was
the torchlight procession, with the bonfire on the top of the hill.”
“I wasn’t there. What else?”
“I think that’s all,” said Michael. “But what are you driving at, Aunt
Barbara?”
She was silent a moment.
“I’m driving at this,” she said. “The Germans are accumulating a vast
quantity of knowledge about England. Tony, for instance, has a German
valet, and when he went down to Portsmouth the other day to see the
American ship that was there, he took him with him. And the man took a
camera and was found photographing where no photography is allowed. Did
you see anything of a camera when the Emperor came to Ashbridge?”
Michael thought.
“Yes; one of his staff was clicking away all day,” he said. “He sent a
lot of them to my mother.”
“And, we may presume, kept some copies himself,” remarked Aunt Barbara
drily. “Really, for childish simplicity the English are the biggest
fools in creation.”
“But do you mean--”
“I mean that the Germans are a very knowledge-seeking people, and that
we gratify their desires in a very simple fashion. Do you think they are
so friendly, Michael? Do you know, for instance, what is a very common
toast in German regimental messes? They do not drink it when there are
foreigners there, but one night during the manoeuvres an officer in
a mess where Tony was dining got slightly ‘on,’ as you may say, and
suddenly drank to ‘Der Tag.’”
“That means ‘The Day,’” said Michael confidently.
“It does; and what day? The day when Germany thinks that all is ripe
for a war with us. ‘Der Tag’ will dawn suddenly from a quiet, peaceful
night, when they think we are all asleep, and when they have got all the
information they think is accessible. War, my dear.”
Michael had never in his life seen his aunt so serious, and he was
amazed at her gravity.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of their spies all over England,” she
said, “and hundreds of their agents all over America. Deep, patient
Germany, as Carlyle said. She’s as patient as God and as deep as the
sea. They are working, working, while our toy soldiers play golf. I
agree with that adorable pianist; and, what’s more, I believe they think
that ‘Der Tag’ is near to dawn. Tony says that their manoeuvres this
year were like nothing that has ever been seen before. Germany is a
fighting machine without parallel in the history of the world.”
She got up and stood with Michael near the fireplace.
“And they think their opportunity is at hand,” she said, “though not
for a moment do they relax their preparations. We are their real enemy,
don’t you see? They can fight France with one hand and Russia with the
other; and in a few months’ time now they expect we shall be in the
throes of an internal revolution over this Irish business. They may be
right, but there is just the possibility that they may be astoundingly
wrong. The fact of the great foreign peril--this nightmare, this
Armageddon of European war--may be exactly that which will pull us
together. But their diplomatists, anyhow, are studying the Irish
question very closely, and German gold, without any doubt at all, is
helping the Home Rule party. As a nation we are fast asleep. I wonder
what we shall be like when we wake. Shall we find ourselves already
fettered when we wake, or will there be one moment, just one moment, in
which we can spring up? At any rate, hitherto, the English have always
been at their best, not their worst, in desperate positions. They hate
exciting themselves, and refuse to do it until the crisis is actually on
them. But then they become disconcertingly serious and cool-headed.”
“And you think the Emperor--” began Michael.
“I think the Emperor is the hardest worker in all Germany,” said
Barbara. “I believe he is trying (and admirably succeeding) to make us
trust his professions of friendship. He has a great eye for detail, too;
it seemed to him worth while to assure you even, my dear Michael, of his
regard and affection for England. He was always impressing on Tony the
same thing, though to him, of course, he said that if there was any
country nearer to his heart than England it was America. Stuff and
nonsense, my dear!”
All this, though struck in a more serious key than was usual with Aunt
Barbara, was quite characteristic of her. She had the quality of mind
which when occupied with one idea is occupied with it to the exclusion
of all others; she worked at full power over anything she took up. But
now she dismissed it altogether.
“You see what a diplomatist I have become,” she said. “It is a
fascinating business: one lives in an atmosphere that is charged with
secret affairs, and it infects one like the influenza. You catch it
somehow, and have a feverish cold of your own. And I am quite useful to
him. You see, I am such a chatterbox that people think I let out things
by accident, which I never do. I let out what I want to let out on
purpose, and they think they are pumping me. I had a long conversation
the other day with one of the German Embassy, all about Irish affairs.
They are hugely interested about Irish affairs, and I just make a note
of that; but they can make as many notes as they please about what
I say, and no one will be any the wiser. In fact, they will be the
foolisher. And now I suppose I had better take myself away.”
“Don’t do anything of the kind,” said Michael.
“But I must. And if when you are down at Ashbridge at Christmas you
find strangers hanging about the deep-water reach, you might just let me
know. It’s no use telling your father, because he will certainly think
they have come to get a glimpse of him as he plays golf. But I expect
you’ll be too busy thinking about that new friend of yours, and perhaps
his sister. What did she tell me we had got to do? ‘To her garlands let
us bring,’ was it not? You and I will both send wreaths, Michael, though
not for her funeral. Now don’t be a hermit any more, but come and see
me. You shall take your garland girl into dinner, if she will come,
too; and her brother shall certainly sit next me. I am so glad you have
become yourself at last. Go on being yourself more and more, my dear: it
suits you.”