by E. F. Benson
He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages, and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it:
VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.
by
Michael Comber
He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.
“Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe,” he wrote at the top.
MICHAEL (Part 2)
CHAPTER VII
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 tonight 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 some
how 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 tonight,” 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.”