VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.ByMichael Comber.
He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.
“Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe,” he wrote at the top.
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.”
Some fortnight later, and not long before Michael was leaving town for his Christmas visit to Ashbridge, Sylvia and her brother were lingering in the big studio from which the last of their Sunday evening guests had just departed. The usual joyous chaos consequent on those entertainments reigned: the top of the piano was covered with the plates and glasses of those who had made an alfresco supper (or breakfast) of fried bacon and beer before leaving; a circle of cushions were ranged on the floor round the fire, for it was a bitterly cold night, and since, for some reason, a series of charades had been spontaneously generated, there was lying about an astonishing collection of pillow-cases, rugs, and table-cloths, and such articles of domestic and household use as could be converted into clothes for this purpose. But the event of the evening had undoubtedly been Hermann’s performance of the “Wenceslas Variations”; these he had now learned, and, as he had promised Michael, was going to play them at his concert in the Steinway Hall in January. To-night a good many musician friends had attended the Sunday evening gathering, and there had been no two opinions about the success of them.
“I was talking to Arthur Lagden about them,” said Falbe, naming a prominent critic of the day, “and he would hardly believe that they were an Opus I., or that Michael had not been studying music technically for years instead of six months. But that’s the odd thing about Mike; he’s so mature.”
It was not unusual for the brother and sister to sit up like this, till any hour, after their guests had gone; and Sylvia collected a bundle of cushions and lay full length on the floor, with her feet towards the fire. For both of them the week was too busy on six days for them to indulge that companionship, sometimes full of talk, sometimes consisting of those dropped words and long silences, on which intimacy lives; and they both enjoyed, above all hours in the week, this time that lay between the friendly riot of Sunday evening and the starting of work again on Monday. There was between them that bond which can scarcely exist between husband and wife, since it almost necessarily implies the close consanguinity of brother and sister, and postulates a certain sort of essential community of nature, founded not on tastes, nor even on affection, but on the fact that the same blood beats in the two. Here an intense affection, too strong to be ever demonstrative, fortified it, and both brother and sister talked to each other, as if they were speaking to some physically independent piece of themselves.
Sylvia had nothing apparently to add on the subject of Michael’s maturity. Instead she just raised her head, which was not quite high enough.
“Stuff another cushion under my head, Hermann,” she said. “Thanks; now I’m completely comfortable, you will be relieved to hear.”
Hermann gazed at the fire in silence.
“That’s a weight off my mind,” he said. “About Michael now. He’s been suppressed all his life, you know, and instead of being dwarfed he has just gone on growing inside. Good Lord! I wish somebody would suppress me for a year or two. What a lot there would be when I took the cork out again. We dissipate too much, Sylvia, both you and I.”
She gave a little grunt, which, from his knowledge of her inarticulate expressions, he took to mean dissent.
“I suppose you mean we don’t,” he remarked.
“Yes. How much one dissipates is determined for one just as is the shape of your nose or the colour of your eyes. By the way, I fell madly in love with that cousin of Michael’s who came with him to-night. He’s the most attractive creature I ever saw in my life. Of course, he’s too beautiful: no boy ought to be as beautiful as that.”
“You flirted with him,” remarked Hermann. “Mike will probably murder him on the way home.”
Sylvia moved her feet a little farther from the blaze.
“Funny?” she asked.
Instantly Falbe knew that her mind was occupied with exactly the same question as his.
“No, not funny at all,” he said. “Quite serious. Do you want to talk about it or not?”
She gave a little groan.
“No, I don’t want to, but I’ve got to,” she said. “Aunt Barbara—we became Sylvia and Aunt Barbara an hour or two ago, and she’s a dear—Aunt Barbara has been talking to me about it already.”
“And what did Aunt Barbara say?”
“Just what you are going to,” said Sylvia; “namely, that I had better make up my mind what I mean to say when Michael says what he means to say.”
She shifted round so as to face her brother as he stood in front of the fire, and pulled his trouser-leg more neatly over the top of his shoe.
“But what’s to happen if I can’t make up my mind?” she said. “I needn’t tell you how much I like Michael; I believe I like him as much as I possibly can. But I don’t know if that is enough. Hermann, is it enough? You ought to know. There’s no use in you unless you know about me.”
She put out her arm, and clasped his two legs in the crook of her elbow. That expressed their attitude, what they were to each other, as absolutely as any physical demonstration allowed. Had there not been the difference of sex which severed them she could never have got the sense of support that this physical contact gave her; had there not been her sisterhood to chaperon her, so to speak, she could never have been so at ease with a man. The two were lover-like, without the physical apexes and limitations that physical love must always bring with it. The complement of sex that brought them so close annihilated the very existence of sex. They loved as only brother and sister can love, without trouble.
The closer contact of his fire-warmed trousers to the calf of his leg made Hermann step out of her encircling arm without any question of hurting her feelings.
“I won’t be burned,” he said. “Sorry, but I won’t be burned. It seems to me, Sylvia, that you ought to like Michael a little more and a little less.”
“It’s no use saying what I ought to do,” she said. “The idea of what I ‘ought’ doesn’t come in. I like him just as much as I like him, neither more nor less.”
He clawed some more cushions together, and sat down on the floor by her. She raised herself a little and rested her body against his folded knees.
“What’s the trouble, Sylvia?” he said.
“Just what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Be more concrete, then. You’re definite enough when you sing.”
She sighed and gave a little melancholy laugh.
“That’s just it,” she said. “People like you and me, and Michael, too, for that matter, are most entirely ourselves when we are at our music. When Michael plays for me I can sing my soul at him. While he and I are in music, if you understand—and of course you do—we belong to each other. Do you know, Hermann, he finds me when I’m singing, without the slightest effort, and even you, as you have so often told me, have to search and be on the lookout. And then the song is over, and, as somebody says, ‘When the feast is finished and the lamps expire,’ then—well, the lamps expire, and he isn’t me any longer, but Michael, with the—the ugly face, and—oh, isn’t it horrible of me—the long arms and the little stumpy legs—if only he was rather different in things that don’t matter, that CAN’T matter! But—but, Hermann, if only Michael was rather like you, and you like Michael, I should love you exactly as much as ever, and I should love Michael, too.”
She was leaning forward, and with both hands was very carefully tying and untying one of Hermann’s shoelaces.
“Oh, thank goodness there is somebody in the world to whom I can say just whatever I feel, and know he understands,” she said. “And I know this, too—and follow me here, Hermann—I know that all that doesn’t really matter; I am sure it doesn’t. I like Michael far too well to let it matter. But there are other things which I don’t see my way through, and they are much more real—”
She was silent again, so long that Hermann reached out for a cigarette, lit it, and threw away the match before she spoke.
“There is Michael’s position,” she said. “When Michael asks me if I will have him, as we both know he is going to do, I shall have to make conditions. I won’t give up my career. I must go on working—in other words, singing—whether I marry him or not. I don’t call it singing, in my sense of the word, to sing ‘The Banks of Allan Water’ to Michael and his father and mother at Ashbridge, any more than it is being a politician to read the morning papers and argue about the Irish question with you. To have a career in politics means that you must be a member of Parliament—I daresay the House of Lords would do—and make speeches and stand the racket. In the same way, to be a singer doesn’t mean to sing after dinner or to go squawking anyhow in a workhouse, but it means to get up on a platform before critical people, and if you don’t do your very best be damned by them. If I marry Michael I must go on singing as a professional singer, and not become an amateur—the Viscountess Comber, who sings so charmingly. I refuse to sing charmingly; I will either sing properly or not at all. And I couldn’t not sing. I shall have to continue being Miss Falbe, so to speak.”
“You say you insist on it,” said Hermann; “but whether you did or not, there is nothing more certain than that Michael would.”
“I am sure he would. But by so doing he would certainly quarrel irrevocably with his people. Even Aunt Barbara, who, after all, is very liberally minded, sees that. They can none of them, not even she, who are born to a certain tradition imagine that there are other traditions quite as stiff-necked. Michael, it is true, was born to one tradition, but he has got the other, as he has shown very clearly by refusing to disobey it. He will certainly, as you say, insist on my endorsing the resolution he has made for himself. What it comes to is this, that I can’t marry him without his father’s complete consent to all that I have told you. I can’t have my career disregarded, covered up with awkward silences, alluded to as a painful subject; and, as I say, even Aunt Barbara seemed to take it for granted that if I became Lady Comber I should cease to be Miss Falbe. Well, there she’s wrong, my dear; I shall continue to be Miss Falbe whether I’m Lady Comber, or Lady Ashbridge, or the Duchess of anything you please. And—here the difficulty really comes in—they must all see how right I am. Difficulty, did I say? It’s more like an impossibility.”
Hermann threw the end of his cigarette into the ashes of the dying fire.
“It’s clear, then,” he said, “you have made up your mind not to marry him.”
She shook her head.
“Oh, Hermann, you fail me,” she said. “If I had made up my mind not to I shouldn’t have kept you up an hour talking about it.”
He stretched his hands out towards the embers already coated with grey ash.
“Then it’s like that with you,” he said, pointing. “If there is the fire in you, it is covered up with ashes.”
She did not reply for a moment.
“I think you’ve hit it there,” she said. “I believe there is the fire; when, as I said, he plays for me I know there is. But the ashes? What are they? And who shall disperse them for me?”
She stood up swiftly, drawing herself to her full height and stretching her arms out.
“There’s something bigger than we know coming,” she said. “Whether it’s storm or sunshine I have no idea. But there will be something that shall utterly sever Michael and me or utterly unite us.”
“Do you care which it is?” he asked.
“Yes, I care,” said she.
He held out his hands to her, and she pulled him up to his feet.
“What are you going to say, then, when he asks you?” he said.
“Tell him he must wait.”
He went round the room putting out the electric lamps and opening the big skylight in the roof. There was a curtain in front of this, which he pulled aside, and from the frosty cloudless heavens the starshine of a thousand constellations filtered down.
“That’s a lot to ask of any man,” he said. “If you care, you care.”
“And if you were a girl you would know exactly what I mean,” she said. “They may know they care, but, unless they are marrying for perfectly different reasons, they have to feel to the end of their fingers that they care before they can say ‘Yes.’”
He opened the door for her to pass out, and they walked up the passage together arm-in-arm.
“Well, perhaps Michael won’t ask you,” he said, “in which case all bother will be saved, and we shall have sat up talking till—Sylvia, did you know it is nearly three—sat up talking for nothing!”
Sylvia considered this.
“Fiddlesticks!” she said.
And Hermann was inclined to agree with her.
This view of the case found confirmation next day, for Michael, after his music lesson, lingered so firmly and determinedly when the three chatted together over the fire that in the end Hermann found nothing to do but to leave them together. Sylvia had given him no sign as to whether she wished him to absent himself or not, and he concluded, since she did not put an end to things by going away herself, that she intended Michael to have his say.
The latter rose as the door closed behind Hermann, and came and stood in front of her. And at the moment Sylvia could notice nothing of him except his heaviness, his plainness, all the things that she had told herself before did not really matter. Now her sensation contradicted that; she was conscious that the ash somehow had vastly accumulated over her fire, that all her affection and regard for him were suddenly eclipsed. This was a complete surprise to her; for the moment she found Michael’s presence and his proximity to her simply distasteful.
“I thought Hermann was never going,” he said.
For a second or two she did not reply; it was clearly no use to continue the ordinary banter of conversation, to suggest that as the room was Hermann’s he might conceivably be conceded the right to stop there if he chose. There was no transition possible between the affairs of every day and the affair for which Michael had stopped to speak. She gave up all attempt to make one; instead, she just helped him.
“What is it, Michael?” she asked.
Then to her, at any rate, Michael’s face completely changed. There burned in it all of a sudden the full glow of that of which she had only seen glimpses.
“You know,” he said.
His shyness, his awkwardness, had all vanished; the time had come for him to offer to her all that he had to offer, and he did it with the charm of perfect manliness and simplicity.
“Whether you can accept me or not,” he said, “I have just to tell you that I am entirely yours. Is there any chance for me, Sylvia?”
He stood quite still, making no movement towards her. She, on her side, found all her distaste of him suddenly vanished in the mere solemnity of the occasion. His very quietness told her better than any protestations could have done of the quality of what he offered, and that quality vastly transcended all that she had known or guessed of him.
“I don’t know, Michael,” she said at length.
She came a step forward, and without any sense of embarrassment found that she, without conscious intention, had put her hands on his shoulders. The moment that was done she was conscious of the impulse that made her do it. It expressed what she felt.
“Yes, I feel like that to you,” she said. “You’re a dear. I expect you know how fond I am of you, and if you don’t I assure you of it now. But I have got to give you more than that.”
Michael looked up at her.
“Yes, Sylvia,” he said, “much more than that.”
A few minutes ago only she had not liked him at all; now she liked him immensely.
“But how, Michael?” she asked. “How can I find it?”
“Oh, it’s I who have got to find it for you,” he said. “That is to say, if you want it to be found. Do you?”
She looked at him gravely, without the tremor of a smile in her eyes.
“What does that mean exactly?” she said.
“It is very simple. Do you want to love me?”
She did not move her hands; they still rested on his shoulders like things at ease, like things at home.
“Yes, I suppose I want to,” she said.
“And is that the most you can do for me at present?” he asked.
That reached her again; all the time the plain words, the plain face, the quiet of him stabbed her with daggers of which he had no idea. She was dismayed at the recollection of her talk with her brother the evening before, of the ease and certitude with which she had laid down her conditions, of not giving up her career, of remaining the famous Miss Falbe, of refusing to take a dishonoured place in the sacred circle of the Combers. Now, when she was face to face with his love, so ineloquently expressed, so radically a part of him, she knew that there was nothing in the world, external to him and her, that could enter into their reckonings; but into their reckonings there had not entered the one thing essential. She gave him sympathy, liking, friendliness, but she did not want him with her blood. And though it was not humanly possible that she could want him with more than that, it was not possible that she could take him with less.
“Yes, that is the most I can do for you at present,” she said.
Still quite quietly he moved away from her, so that he stood free of her hands.
“I have been constantly here all these last months,” he said. “Now that you know what I have told you, do you want not to see me?”
That stabbed her again.
“Have I implied that?” she asked.
“Not directly. But I can easily understand its being a bore to you. I don’t want to bore you. That would be a very stupid way of trying to make you care for me. As I said, that is my job. I haven’t accomplished it as yet. But I mean to. I only ask you for a hint.”
She understood her own feeling better than he. She understood at least that she was dealing with things that were necessarily incalculable.
“I can’t give you a hint,” she said. “I can’t make any plans about it. If you were a woman perhaps you would understand. Love is, or it isn’t. That is all I know about it.”
But Michael persisted.
“I only know what you have taught me,” he said. “But you must know that.”
In a flash she became aware that it would be impossible for her to behave to Michael as she had behaved to him for several months past. She could not any longer put a hand on his shoulder, beat time with her fingers on his arm, knowing that the physical contact meant nothing to her, and all—all to him. The rejection of him as a lover rendered the sisterly attitude impossible. And not only must she revise her conduct, but she must revise the mental attitude of which it was the physical counterpart. Up till this moment she had looked at the situation from her own side only, had felt that no plans could be made, that the natural thing was to go on as before, with the intimacy that she liked and the familiarity that was the obvious expression of it. But now she began to see the question from his side; she could not go on doing that which meant nothing particular to her, if that insouciance meant something so very particular to him. She realised that if she had loved him the touch of his hand, the proximity of his face would have had significance for her, a significance that would have been intolerable unless there was something mutual and secret between them. It had seemed so easy, in anticipation, to tell him that he must wait, so simple for him just—well, just to wait until she could make up her mind. She believed, as she had told her brother, that she cared for Michael, or as she had told him that she wanted to—the two were to the girl’s mind identical, though expressed to each in the only terms that were possible—but until she came face to face with the picture of the future, that to her wore the same outline and colour as the past, she had not known the impossibility of such a presentment. The desire of the lover on Michael’s part rendered unthinkable the sisterly attitude on hers. That her instinct told her, but her reason revolted against it.
“Can’t we go on as we were, Michael?” she said.
He looked at her incredulously.
“Oh, no, of course not that,” he said.
She moved a step towards him.
“I can’t think of you in any other way,” she said, as if making an appeal.
He stood absolutely unresponsive. Something within him longed that she should advance a step more, that he should again have the touch of her hands on his shoulders, but another instinct stronger than that made him revoke his desire, and if she had moved again he would certainly have fallen back before her.
“It may seem ridiculous to you,” he said, “since you do not care. But I can’t do that. Does that seem absurd to you I? I am afraid it does; but that is because you don’t understand. By all means let us be what they call excellent friends. But there are certain little things which seem nothing to you, and they mean so much to me. I can’t explain; it’s just the brotherly relation which I can’t stand. It’s no use suggesting that we should be as we were before—”
She understood well enough for his purposes.
“I see,” she said.
Michael paused for a moment.
“I think I’ll be going now,” he said. “I am off to Ashbridge in two days. Give Hermann my love, and a jolly Christmas to you both. I’ll let you know when I am back in town.”
She had no reply to this; she saw its justice, and acquiesced.
“Good-bye, then,” said Michael.
He walked home from Chelsea in that utterly blank and unfeeling consciousness which almost invariably is the sequel of any event that brings with it a change of attitude towards life generally. Not for a moment did he tell himself that he had been awakened from a dream, or abandon his conviction that his dream was to be made real. The rare, quiet determination that had made him give up his stereotyped mode of life in the summer and take to music was still completely his, and, if anything, it had been reinforced by Sylvia’s emphatic statement that “she wanted to care.” Only her imagining that their old relations could go on showed him how far she was from knowing what “to care” meant. At first without knowing it, but with a gradually increasing keenness of consciousness, he had become aware that this sisterly attitude of hers towards him had meant so infinitely much, because he had taken it to be the prelude to something more. Now he saw that it was, so to speak, a piece complete in itself. It bore no relation to what he had imagined it would lead into. No curtain went up when the prelude was over; the curtain remained inexorably hanging there, not acknowledging the prelude at all. Not for a moment did he accuse her of encouraging him to have thought so; she had but given him a frankness of comradeship that meant to her exactly what it expressed. But he had thought otherwise; he had imagined that it would grow towards a culmination. All that (and here was the change that made his mind blank and unfeeling) had to be cut away, and with it all the budding branches that his imagination had pictured as springing from it. He could not be comrade to her as he was to her brother—the inexorable demands of sex forbade it.
He went briskly enough through the clean, dry streets. The frost of last night had held throughout the morning, and the sunlight sparkled with a rare and seasonable brightness of a traditional Christmas weather. Hecatombs of turkeys hung in the poulterers’ windows, among sprigs of holly, and shops were bright with children’s toys. The briskness of the day had flushed the colour into the faces of the passengers in the street, and the festive air of the imminent holiday was abroad. All this Michael noticed with a sense of detachment; what had happened had caused a veil to fall between himself and external things; it was as if he was sealed into some glass cage, and had no contact with what passed round him. This lasted throughout his walk, and when he let himself into his flat it was with the same sense of alienation that he found his cousin Francis gracefully reclining on the sofa that he had pulled up in front of the fire.
Francis was inclined to be querulous.
“I was just wondering whether I should give you up,” he said. “The hour that you named for lunch was half-past one. And I have almost forgotten what your clock sounded like when it struck two.”
This also seemed to matter very little.
“Did I ask you to lunch?” he said. “I really quite forgot; I can’t even remember doing it now.”
“But there will be lunch?” asked Francis rather anxiously.
“Of course. It’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
Michael came and stood in front of the fire, and looked with a sudden spasm of envy on the handsome boy who lay there. If he himself had been anything like that
—“I was distinctly chippy this morning,” remarked Francis, “and so I didn’t so much mind waiting for lunch. I attribute it to too much beer and bacon last night at your friend’s house. I enjoyed it—I mean the evening, and for that matter the bacon—at the time. It really was extremely pleasant.”
He yawned largely and openly.
“I had no idea you could frolic like that, Mike,” he said. “It was quite a new light on your character. How did you learn to do it? It’s quite a new accomplishment.”