Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarra.s.sments which that s.e.x had always held for him. She grew in comradeship; he found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same warm, welcoming kindliness--the same complete absence of pose. You knew where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the mult.i.tude which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they with her, in relationship entirely unsentimental.

But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael's most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe's principles in teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school; he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the hours.

"What is the good of them?" he asked. "They can only give you nimbleness and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pa.s.s over a bar that you don't understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try."

Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.

"There," he said, "begin at the top of the page."

"But I can't," said Michael. "I shall have to spell it out."

"That's just what you mustn't do. Go ahead, and don't pause till you get to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its turn, and play as many notes as you can in it."

This was a dismal experience. Michael hitherto had gone on the painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious care. Now Falbe's inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in inextinguishable laughter.

"Go on, go on!" he shouted. "I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly Strauss's Don Quixote."

Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe's laughter.

"Oh dear," he said. "Very funny. But don't laugh so at me, Hermann."

Falbe dried his eyes.

"And what was it?" he said. "I declare it was the fourth fugue. An entirely different conception of it! A thoroughly original view! Now, what you've got to do, is to repeat that--not the same murder I mean, but other murders--for a couple of hours a day. . . . By degrees--you won't believe it--you will find you are not murdering any longer, but only mortally wounding. After six months I dare say you won't even be hurting your victims. All the same, you can begin with less muscular ones."

In this way Michael's musical horizons were infinitely extended. Not only did this system of Falbe's of flying at new music, and going recklessly and regardlessly on, give quickness to his brain and finger, make his wits alert to pick up the new language he was learning, but it gloriously extended his vision and his range of country. He ran joyfully, though with a thousand falls and tumbles, through these new and wonderful vistas; he worshipped at the grave, Gothic sanctuaries of Beethoven, he roamed through the enchanted garden of Chopin, he felt the icy and eternal frosts of Russia, and saw in the northern sky the great auroras spread themselves in spear and sword of fire; he listened to the wisdom of Brahms, and pa.s.sed through the n.o.ble and smiling country of Bach. All this, so to speak, was holiday travel, and between his journeys he applied himself with the same eager industry to the learning of his art, so that he might reproduce for himself and others true pictures of the scenes through which he scampered. Here Falbe was not so easily moved to laughter; he was as severe with Michael as he was with himself, when it was the question of learning some piece with a view to really playing it. There was no light-hearted hurrying on through blurred runs and false notes, slurred phrases and incomplete chords.

Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was played again on Falbe's great Steinway, as a professed performance, a very different standard was required.

Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.

"This won't do, Michael," he said. "You played it before for me to see whether you could play. You can. But it won't do to sketch it. Every note has got to be there; Chopin didn't write them by accident. He knew quite well what he was about. Begin again, please."

This time Michael got not quite so far, when he was stopped again. He was playing without notes, and Falbe got up from his chair where he had the book open, and put it on the piano.

"Do you find difficulty in memorising?" he asked.

This was discouraging; Michael believed that he remembered easily; he also believed that he had long known this by heart.

"No; I thought I knew it," he said.

"Try again."

This time Falbe stood by him, and suddenly put his finger down into the middle of Michael's hands, striking a note.

"You left out that F sharp," he said. "Go on. . . . Now you are leaving out that E natural. Try to get it better by Thursday, and remember this, that playing, and all that differentiates playing from strumming, only begins when you can play all the notes that are put down for you to play without fail. You're beginning at the wrong end; you have admirable feeling about that prelude, but you needn't think about feeling till you've got all the notes at your fingers' ends. Then and not till then, you may begin to remember that you want to be a pianist. Now, what's the next thing?"

Michael felt somewhat squashed and discouraged. He had thought he had really worked successfully at the thing he knew so well by sight. His heavy eyebrows drew together.

"You told me to harmonise that Christmas carol," he remarked, rather shortly.

Falbe put his hand on his shoulder.

"Look here, Michael," he said, "you're vexed with me. Now, there's nothing to be vexed at. You know quite well you were leaving out lots of notes from those jolly fat chords, and that you weren't playing cleanly.

Now I'm taking you seriously, and I won't have from you anything but the best you can do. You're not doing your best when you don't even play what is written. You can't begin to work at this till you do that."

Michael had a moment's severe tussle with his temper. He felt vexed and disappointed that Hermann should have sent him back like a schoolboy with his exercise torn over. Not immediately did he confess to himself that he was completely in the wrong.

"I'm doing the best I can," he said. "It's rather discouraging."

He moved his big shoulders slightly, as if to indicate that Hermann's hand was not wanted there. Hermann kept it there.

"It might be discouraging," he said, "if you were doing your best."

Michael's ill-temper oozed from him.

"I'm wrong," he said, turning round with the smile that made his ugly face so pleasant. "And I'm sorry both that I have been slack and that I've been sulky. Will that do?"

Falbe laughed.

"Very well indeed," he said. "Now for 'Good King Wenceslas.' Wasn't it--"

"Yes; I got awfully interested over it, Hermann. I thought I would try and work it up into a few variations."

"Let's hear," said Falbe.

This was a vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure; it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid octaves, and finally a.s.serted itself, heard once more, over a great scale base of bells.

Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done over Michael's fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up with a certain excitement.

"Do you know what you've done?" he said. "You've done something that's really good. Faults? Yes, millions; but there's a first-rate imagination at the bottom of it. How did it happen?"

Michael flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, they sang themselves," he said, "and I learned them. But will it really do? Is there anything in it?"

"Yes, old boy, there's King Wenceslas in it, and you've dressed him up well. Play that last one again."

The last one was taxing to the fingers, but Michael's big hands banged out the octave scale in the ba.s.s with wonderful ease, and Falbe gave a great guffaw of pleasure at the rollicking conclusion.

"Write them all down," he said, "and try if you can hear it singing half a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to play the lot at my concert in January."

Michael gasped.

"You don't mean that?" he said.

"Certainly I do. It's a fine bit of stuff."

It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits of the air--whatever those melodious sprites may be--had for the last month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now, as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing; their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed himself, and they haunted him no longer. At present he had but jotted down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of his own brain, setting Falbe his task.