Michael Part 9

"But what's the matter?" he asked. "Have I annoyed you somehow? I'm awfully sorry."

Falbe did not reply for a moment.

"No, you've not annoyed me," he said. "I've annoyed myself. But that's the worst of living on one's nerves, which is the penalty of Baireuth.

There is no charge, so to speak, except for your ticket, but a collection is made, as happens at meetings, and you pay with your nerves. You must cancel my annoyance, please. If I showed it I did not mean to."

Michael pondered over this.

"But I can't leave it like that," he said at length. "Was it about the possibility of war, which I said was unthinkable?"

Falbe laughed and turned on his elbow towards Michael.

"No, my dear chap," he said. "You may believe it to be unthinkable, and I may believe it to be inevitable; but what does it matter what either of us believes? Che sara sara. It was quite another thing that caused me to annoy myself. It does not matter."

Michael lay back on the soft slope.

"Yet I insist on knowing," he said. "That is, I mean, if it is not private."

Falbe lay quietly with his long fingers in the sediment of pine-needles.

"Well, then, as it is not private, and as you insist," he said, "I will certainly tell you. Does it not strike you that you are behaving like an absolute stranger to me? We have talked of me and my home and my plans all the time since we met at Victoria Station, and you have kept complete silence about yourself. I know nothing of you, not who you are, or what you are, or what your flag is. You fly no flag, you proclaim no ident.i.ty. You may be a crossing-sweeper, or a grocer, or a marquis for all I know. Of course, that matters very little; but what does matter is that never for a moment have you shown me not what you happen to be, but what you are. I've got the impression that you are something, that there's a real 'you' in your inside. But you don't let me see it. You send a polite servant to the door when I knock. Probably this sounds very weird and un-English to you. But to my mind it is much more weird to behave as you are behaving. Come out, can't you. Let's look at you."

It was exactly that--that brusque, unsentimental appeal--that Michael needed. He saw himself at that moment, as Falbe saw him, a sh.e.l.led and m.u.f.fled figure, intangible and withdrawn, but observing, as it were, through eye-holes, and giving nothing in exchange for what he saw.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's quite true what you tell me. I'm like that.

But it really has never struck me that anybody cared to know."

Falbe ceased digging his excavation in the pine-needles and looked up on Michael.

"Good Lord, man!" he said; "people care if you'll only allow them to.

The indifference of other people is a false term for the secretiveness of oneself. How can they care, unless you let them know what there is to care for?"

"But I'm completely uninteresting," said Michael.

"Yes; I'll judge of that," said Falbe.

Slowly, and with diffident pauses, Michael began to speak of himself, feeling at first as if he was undressing in public. But as he went on he became conscious of the welcome that his story received, though that welcome only expressed itself in perfectly unemotional monosyllables. He might be undressing, but he was undressing in front of a fire. He knew that he uncovered himself to no icy blast or contemptuous rain, as he had felt when, so few days before, he had spoken of himself and what he was to his father. There was here the common land of music to build upon, whereas to Lord Ashbridge that same soil had been, so to speak, the territory of the enemy. And even more than that, there was the instinct, the certain conviction that he was telling his tale to sympathetic ears, to which the mere fact that he was speaking of himself presupposed a friendly hearing. Falbe, he felt, wanted to know about him, regardless of the nature of his confessions. Had he said that he was an undetected kleptomaniac, Falbe would have liked to know, have been pleased at any tidings, provided only they were authentic. This seemed to reveal itself to him even as he spoke; it had been there waiting for him to claim it, lying there as in a poste restante, only ready for its owner.

At the end Falbe gave a long sigh.

"And why the devil didn't you give me any hint of it before?" he asked.

"I didn't think it mattered," said Michael.

"Well, then, you are amazingly wrong. Good Lord, it's about the most interesting thing I've ever heard. I didn't know anybody could escape from that awful sort of prison-house in which our--I'm English now--in which our upper cla.s.s immures itself. Yet you've done it. I take it that the thing is done now?"

"I'm not going back into the prison-house again, if you mean that," said Michael.

"And will your father cut you off?" asked he.

"Oh, I haven't the least idea," said Michael.

"Aren't you going to inquire?"

Michael hesitated.

"No, I'm sure I'm not," he said. "I can't do that. It's his business.

I couldn't ask about what he had done, or meant to do. It's a sort of pride, I suppose. He will do as he thinks proper, and when he has thought, perhaps he will tell me what he intends."

"But, then, how will you live?" asked Falbe.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you that. I've got some money, quite a lot, I mean, from my grandmother. In some ways I rather wish I hadn't. It would have been a proof of sincerity to have become poor. That wouldn't have made the smallest difference to my resolution."

Falbe laughed.

"And so you are rich, and yet go second-cla.s.s," he said. "If I were rich I would make myself exceedingly comfortable. I like things that are good to eat and soft to touch. But I'm bound to say that I get on quite excellently without them. Being poor does not make the smallest difference to one's happiness, but only to the number of one's pleasures."

Michael paused a moment, and then found courage to say what for the last two days he had been longing to give utterance to.

"I know; but pleasures are very nice things," he said. "And doesn't it seem obvious now that you are coming to Munich with me? It's a purely selfish suggestion on my part. After being with you it will be very stupid to be alone there. But it would be so delightful if you would come."

Falbe looked at him a moment without speaking, but Michael saw the light in his eyes.

"And what if I have my pride too?" he said. "Then I shall apologise for having made the proposal," said Michael simply.

For just a second more Falbe hesitated. Then he held out his hand.

"I thank you most awfully," he said. "I accept with the greatest pleasure."

Michael drew a long breath of relief.

"I am glad," he said. "So that's settled. It's really nice of you."

The heat of the day was pa.s.sing off, and over the sun-bleached plain the coolness of evening was beginning to steal. Overhead the wind stirred more resonantly in the pines, and in the bushes birds called to each other. Presently after, they rose from where they had lain all the afternoon and strolled along the needled slope to where, through a vista in the trees, they looked down on the lake and the hamlet that cl.u.s.tered near it. Down the road that wound through the trees towards it pa.s.sed labourers going homeward from their work, with cheerful guttural cries to each other and a herd of cows sauntered by with bells melodiously chiming, taking leisurely mouthfuls from the herbage of the wayside.

In the village, lying low in the clear dusk, scattered lights began to appear, the smoke of evening fires to ascend, and the aromatic odour of the burning wood strayed towards them up the wind.

Falbe, whose hand lay in the crook of Michael's arm, pointed downwards to the village that lay there sequestered and rural.

"That's Germany," he said; "it's that which lies at the back of every German heart. There lie the springs of the Rhine. It's out of that originally that there came all that Germany stands for, its music, its poetry, its philosophy, its kultur. All flowed from these quiet uplands.

It was here that the nation began to think and to dream. To dreamt! It's out of dreams that all has sprung."

He laughed.

"And then next week when we go to Munich, you will find me saying that this, this Athens of a town, with its museums and its galleries and its music, is Germany. I shall be right, too. Out of much dreaming comes the need to make. It is when the artist's head and heart are full of his dreams that his hands itch for the palette or the piano. Nuremberg!

Cannot we stop a few hours, at least, in Nuremberg, and see the meadow by the Pegnitz where the Meistersingers held their contest of song and the wooden, gabled house where Albrecht Durer lived? That will teach you Germany, too. The bud of their dream was opening then; and what flower, even in the magnificence of its full-blowing, is so lovely? Albrecht Durer, with his deep, patient eyes, and his patient hands with their unerring stroke; or Bach, with the fugue flowing from his brain through his quick fingers, making stars--stars fixed forever in the heaven of harmony! Don't tell me that there is anything in the world more wonderful! We may have invented a few more instruments, we may have experimented with a few more combinations of notes, but in the B minor Ma.s.s, or in the music of the Pa.s.sion, all is said. And all that came from the woods and the country and the quiet life in little towns, when the artist did his work because he loved it, and cared not one jot about what anybody else thought about it. We are a nation of thinkers and dreamers."

Michael hesitated a moment.